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456 Roman Jakobson
The legend of a ‘militant anti-psychologism’, allegedly proper to this movement,
is based on several misunderstandings. When phenomenologically
oriented linguists resorted to the slogans of anti-psychologism, they used this
term in the same way as Husserl did when he opposed a model of a new, phenomenological
psychology with its fundamental concept of intentionality to the
orthodox behaviorism and to other varieties of stimuli-responses psychology.
This model and kindred psychological orientations met with vivid interest
among linguists and with their readiness to cooperate as well.
One may recollect the contact and convergences between the research of Saussure
and ClaparBde,Trubetzkoy’s and Karl Biihler’s fruitful discussions, the particularattention
which West Europeanand American linguistspaid to the progress
of Gestalt psychology, and theinstructivewarnings of two American experts in the
relationship between language and mind, E. Sapir and B. L. Whorf, to the gestaltists
who, as far as language is concerned, rather ‘let the matter drop’ since they
‘have neither the time nor the linguistic training required to penetrate this
field’ and since ‘their ideas and terminology inherited from the old laboratory
psychology are a liability rather than an asset’ (Whorf). In a similar way, Sapir,
although aware that linguistics is destined to have a special value for configurative
psychology, suspected that ‘a really fruitful integration of linguistic and
psychological study lies still in the future’, because linguistics is one of the most
intricate fields of inquiry for psychologists.
The only offshoot of modern linguistics which the allegations of antiphilosophical,
anti-mentalist, and anti-semantic bent really suit has been the linguistic
activity of the so-called mechanists, a group of American linguists influential
mainly in the forties but now nearly vanishing. The rigorously restrictive
problem of mechanistic investigation may be interpreted, however, as a set
of useful reductionist experiments, irrespective of the philosophical credo of
the experimentalist. At any rate, despite all the particularities of this regional
team which separate it from all the other groups of linguists in the present-day
world, the analysis of linguistic structures is the common denominator of all
the contemporary scientific currents. And this persisting trait sharply distinguishes
the linguistic research of the last four or five decades from the main
routes and targets of the anterior period.
The late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries were marked by a continuous
upsurge of comparative historical studies. At the same time, however,
tentative writings of lone seekers in different countries reveal the first, precursory
inklings of a prospective, structural approach to language. These anticipations
and efforts culminate in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique
ginkrale, a posthumous edition of 1916 arranged by Ch. Bally and A. Sechehaye
on the basis of students’ records. The five subsequent decades have witnessed an
unprecedented, strenuous rise and capital revision of the linguistic science, and
the clearest way to point out the essential innovations will be to confront them
with the Saussurian doctrine, which has been viewed as the start of a new era
in the science of language.
Most of the fundamental theoretical concepts and principles introduced by
Saussure go back to his older contemporaries, Baudouin de Courtenay and