The code model of communication: a powerful - SIL International

3. The Code Model Decoded 37
At the time of Saussure’s lectures, the study of language had been dominated for over 30
years by (a) historical work on the language of written texts (work which had only gradually
come to be distinguished from ‘philology,’ inquiry aimed not at the language but at better
understanding of the text itself); (b) dialectological work based on field investigation of local
dialects; (c) phonetics, which demanded increasingly minute observation in strong adherence
to the positivistic spirit; and (d) psychology, the principal domain of a global perspective on
language …. (Joseph 1994:3664)
Dissatisfied with the direction in which the discipline seemed to be proceeding,
Saussure taught an alternative perspective. Albeit unwittingly as far as Saussure was
concerned, the result was to redirect the course of the entire discipline.
Saussure’s problem was to delineate a study of language that would be neither historical
nor ahistorical, neither psychological nor apsychological; yet more systematic than Whitneyan
general linguistics [(Whitney had died in 1894)], so as to be at least the equal in intellectual
and methodological rigor to the historical, psychological, and phonetic approaches. His
solution was to make a strong distinction between the study of language as a static system,
which he called ‘synchronic’ linguistics, and the study of language change, which he called
‘diachronic’ linguistics (or, until 1908, ‘evolutive’). (Joseph 1994:3664)
Harris and Taylor argue that these developments each align with a basic goal, so that
the total impact was to break the surrogationalist tradition that had affected linguistic
science for centuries, even from the time of the ancient Greeks: 24
The whole of the Cours de linguistique générale is, in effect, dedicated to arguing that a
language is not to be confused with a nomenclature. This confusion Saussure saw—rightly—
as a major obstacle to understanding the systematicity of language. It is a confusion which is
central to the thesis which is sometimes called ‘surrogationalism’, which has a venerable
history in the Western tradition of theorizing about language. The surrogationalist views
words as surrogates or proxies, having meaning by ‘standing for’ something else of a nonlinguistic
nature, and the central task of elucidating how language works as consisting in
showing the various types of relationship between words and what they stand for. In short,
surrogationalism seeks to explain language in terms of relationship between language and
what exists independently outside language. For Saussure, surrogationalism embodies a
profound misconception of how language works. The systematicity of language cannot be
explained simply by seeking correlations between individual linguistic signs and objects, or
events, or classes thereof in the world outside. (Harris and Taylor 1997:221)
Contemporary readers may not readily grasp the significance of Saussure’s struggle
against nomenclaturism. The historical-comparative tradition, then the prevailing
approach to linguistic studies, was a somewhat different science than is historicalcomparative
linguistics of today. Historical-comparativists saw as their task the tracing of
‘evolutionary’ patterns in sound change; the linguist would identify individual words,
then trace their history through time and through the various daughter languages where
they were represented. In Saussure’s opinion, this was an entirely inadequate account of
language, if indeed it was accounting for language at all. Harris explains:
Where historical philology had failed, in Saussure’s opinion, was in simply not
recognising the structural nature of the sign. As a result, it had concentrated upon features
24 See Harris (1980:44f.) for a general discussion of surrogationalism in Western thought.