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Linguistics 427
phenomena it functions as their substructure, groundwork, and universal
medium. Therefore, ‘it is obviously easier to abstract linguistics from the
remainder of culture and define it separately than the reverse’ @I, p. 124; 178).
Certain peculiar features of language are connected with this particular position
of language in relation to culture, especially the early acquisition of language
by children and the fact that neither the ancient nor the contemporary languages
of the world which are known to the linguist show any difference whatsoever in
their phonological and grammatical structure between more primitive and more
progressive stages.
Whorf’s acute search (189) hints at a tangled and creative interplay between
the array of our grammatical concepts and our habitual, subliminal, mythologi-
cal and poetic imagery, but without authorizing us to imply some foremost
compulsory relation between this verbal pattern and our purely ideational
operations or to derive our system of grammatical categories from an ancestral
world-view.
The linguistic framework of courtship, marriage, and kinship rules and
taboos is their indispensable implement. The careful and exhaustive observa-
tions of Genevibve Calame-Griaule on the pragmatics of language in the erotic,
societal, and religious life of a community is a telling illustration of the decisive
role of verbal behavior in the entire domain of social anthropology (26).
In the centuries-old history of economics andlinguistics, questions unitingboth
disciplines have arisen repeatedly. One may recall that economists of the En-
lightenment Period used to attack linguistic problems, as, for example, Anne-
Robert-Jacques Turgot, who compiled a study on etymology for the EncyclopO
die, or Adam Smith, who wrote on the origin of language. G. Tarde’s influence
on Saussure’s doctrine in such matters as circuit, exchange, value, output/input,
producer/consumer is well-known. Many common topics, as, for instance,
‘dynamic synchrony’, contradictions within the system, and its continual motion,
undergo similar developments in both fields. Fundamental economic concepts
were repeatedly subjected to tentative semiotic interpretation. In the early
eighteenth century, the Russian economist Ivan Posoikov coined the catch-
phrase ‘a ruble is not silver, a ruble is the ruler’s word‘, and John Law taught
that money has only the wealth of a sign based on the prince’s signature. At
present, Talcott Parsons (in 134 and rggu) systematically treats money as ‘a
very highly specialized language’, economic transactions as ‘certain types of
conversations’, the circulation of money as ‘the sending of messages’, and the
monetary system as ‘a code in the grammatical-syntactical sense’. He avowedly
applies to the economic interchange the theory of code and message developed
in linguistics. Or, according to the formulation of Ferruccio Rossi-Landi,
‘I’economia in senso proprio b studio di que1 settore del segnico non-verbale,
che consiste nella circolazione di un particolar tipo di messaggi solitamente
chiamati “merci”. Pih in breve, e con una formula: l’economia 2 studio dei
messuggi-merci’ (r48, p. 62). In order to avoid a metaphorical extension of the
term ‘language’, it is, perhaps, preferable to interpret money as a semiotic
system with a particular destination. A semiotic interpretation of the processes
and concepts involved is necessary for the exact scrutiny of this medium of