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CHAPTER V1
Linguistics
ROMAN JAKOBSON
I. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE AND OTHER SCIENCES
A. The place of linguistics among the sciences of man
The autonomy of linguistics was the catchword launched and propagated by
Antoine Meillet at the First Congress of Linguists (Hague, 1928), and the con-
cluding report of its secretary, the noted Dutch linguist J. Schrijnen, with ref-
erence to Meillet’s standpoint, viewed the entire historic assembly as a solemn
‘act of emancipation’ : C’e‘tait un coup d’essai, une tentative.. . La linguistique a,
au grand jour et devant le forum du monde entier, plaide‘ ses propres causes ...
(r, p. 97)*. This was a pertinent and timely program which, throughout the
subsequent decades, deepened and enhanced the methods and tasks of our
science. At present, however, we are faced with an urgent need for an inter-
disciplinary teamwork to be pursued diligently by savants of different branches.
In particular, the relationship between linguistics and the adjacent sciences
awaits an intensive examination.
The necessity to combine the internal consolidation of linguistics with a
substantial widening of its horizon was enunciated by Edward Sapir shortly
after the Hague Congress and most probably as an immediate lucid response to
the latter’s platform. He argued that linguists, whether they like it or not, ‘must
become increasingly concerned with the many anthropological, sociological, and
psychological problems which invade the field of language’, because ‘it is
difficult for a modern linguist to confine himself to his traditional subject
matter. Unless he is somewhat unimaginative, he cannot but share in some or
all of the mutual interests which tie up linguistics with anthropology and culture
history, with sociology, with psychology, with philosophy, and, more remotely,
with physics and physiology’ (155 or 154, pp. 166, 161).
Let us add that unless these two complementary notions - autonomy and
integration - are linked intimately with each other, our endeavor becomes
diverted to a wrong end: either the salutary idea of autonomy degenerates into
* For sources cited see p. 48.