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428 Roman Jakobson
communication. Since, however, ‘the most general matrix’ of symbolic systems,
as Parsons rightly points out, ‘is language’, linguistics actually appears to offer
the most helpful model for such an analysis. Yet there are further reasons for
connecting economics with linguistic studies : the exchange of utilities ‘converted‘
into words (134, p. 358), the direct concomitant role of language in all monetary
transactions, and the translatability of money into purely verbal messages, such
as checks or other obligations (67, p. 568). Indeed, the symbolic verbal aspect of
the economic transactions deserves a systematic interdisciplinary investigation
as one of the most beneficial tasks of applied semiotic.
Thus, communication of mates and goods or services proves to be to a high
degree an interchange of auxiliary messages, and the integrated science of
communication incorporates semiotic proper, i.e. the study of sheer messages
and their underlying codes, plus those disciplines wherein messages play a
relevant yet solely accessory role. In any event, semiotic occupies a central
position within the total science of communication and underlies all other
provinces of this science, while semiotic, in turn, comprises linguistics as its
central section which influences all other semiotic provinces. Three integrated
sciences encompass each other and present three gradually increasing degrees
of generality :
I. Study in communication of verbal messages =linguistics;
2. Study in communication of any messages =semiotic (communication of ver-
bal messages implied) ;
3. Study in communication =social anthropology jointly with economics (com-
munication of messages implied).
Studies developing at present under such overlapping labels as sociolinguistics,
anthropological linguistics, and ethnolinguistics or folk linguistics represent a
sound reaction against some still frequent survivals of the Saussurian tendency
to curtail the tasks and aims of linguistic research. Yet all such constraints of
aims and purposes superimposed by individual linguists or linguistic teams on
their own investigatory program should not be labeled ‘pernicious’; any particu-
lar emphasis upon some limited sections of linguistic science or any degree of
self-restriction and rigorous specialization is perfectly legitimate. What would
be, however, erroneous and pernicious is any degradation of all the other
facets of language as supposedly residual, second-rate linguistic questions, and,
especially, any attempt to expel these topics from linguistics proper. Linguistic
experimentation may deliberately cut off certain inherent properties of language.
Such were, for example, in a large group of American linguists, experiments with
the exclusion of meaning, first from linguistic analysis in general, and later at
least from grammatical analysis. Such have been, also, Saussurian, recently
revived propensities to confine analysis merely to the code (langue, competence)
in spite of the indissoluble dialectic unity 1angueJparole (code/message, compe-
tence/performance).
None of such eliminative experiments, however useful and instructive they
are, can be viewed as a compulsory narrowing of the total scope of linguistic
science. The various tasks and questions recently advanced and discussed under
such labels as socio-linguistics all deserve a thorough study, and, one must add,