Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

454 Roman Jakobson
At present, different sciences display similar phenomena. In the same way
that general topology underlies and encompasses a wide range of mathematical
approaches, also the manifold treatments of language reflect merely the plural-
ity of its aspects that are in complementary relation with each other. This view
is beginning to gain ground among experts. Thus, Noam Chomsky (1968)
emphasizes the necessity for a synthesis between those major linguistic currents,
one of which ‘has raised the precision of discourse about language to entirely
new levels’, while the other is ‘devoted to abstract generalization’.
The inquiry into the verbal structure is the undeniable aim of contemporary
linguistics in all its varieties, and the cardinal principles of such a structural
(or in other terms, nomothetic) approach to language that are common to all
the shades and sectors of this research may be defined as the conjugate ideas of
invariance and relativity. The habitual bias branded by Sapir as a ‘dogged
acceptance of absolutes’ was gradually overcome. The scrutiny of the verbal
system demanded an ever deepening insight into its intrinsic coherence and into
the strictly relational and hierarchical nature of all its constituents. The next
indispensable request was a similar insight into the general laws governing all
verbal systems and, finally, into the interconnection between these laws. Thus,
the elicitation and interpretation of the entire linguistic network - or, in
remodeled wording, ‘the concern for explanatory adequacy’ - has been the
dominant theme of the movement that took shape during the interwar period
under the label ‘structural linguistics’, coined in Prague in 1928-29.
Sometimes a parochial overestimation of discord threatens to distort the
developmental history of linguistics from the first world war until its present
state. In particular, the inflationary myth of gradual revolutions allegedly ex-
perienced by the science of language throughout this period arbitrarily assigns
certain strivings and ideas to single phases of this period. Hence, for example,
the structural trend in general linguistics which took root with the International
Congresses of the late twenties and early thirties is now being reproved for its
supposed estrangement from philosophy, whereas in reality the international
protagonists of this movement had close and effective connections with phenom-
enology in its Husserlian and Hegelian versions. In the Moscow Linguistic
Circle of the early twenties, continuous and ardent debates led by Gustav
Spet - in Husserl’s opinion, one of his most remarkable students - were con-
cerned with the linguistic use of the Logische Untersuchungen and especially
with Husserl’s and Anton Marty’s suggestive return to ‘the thought of a uni-
versal grammar conceived by the rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries’ and anticipated by the medieval philosophers of language. T. G.
Masaryk and Marty, both of whom, like their friend Husserl, had been molded
in Brentano’s school, exerted a wholesome influence on their auditor, Vilkm
Mathesius, the later founder of the Prague Linguistic Circle, where Husserl’s
ideas and his remarkable personal address of November 11, 1935 - ‘Phano-
menologie der Sprache’ - met with a responsive welcome. Acta Linguistica,
published by the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen, were inaugurated in 1939 by
Viggo Brondal’s editorial article, which treats the structure of language ‘comme
objet autonome et par conskquent comme non-dkrivable des BlBments dont elle