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

458 Roman Jakobson
graphic substitutes and to a tenacious request for an exhaustive, comparative
inquiry into the distinct autonomous properties of the oral and written varieties
of language; sound patterns utilized for the building up of meaningful distinc-
tions proved to be based on a semiotic selection and adaptation of natural
phonic means; a typology of the extant phonological systems based on a strictly
relational standpoint was attempted, and implicational laws of universal valid-
ity were inferred from it.
The Saussurian inner duality of langue and parole (which mirrors the synony-
mous distinction of jazyk and re? launched by Baudouin de Courtenay in
I 870) or, to use a modern, less ambiguous terminology, ‘code’ (Saussure’s code
de la langue) and ‘message’ - alias ‘competence’
and ‘performance’ - gives rise
to two divergent approaches within the same section of the Cours: ‘Sans doute,
ces deux objets sont Ctroitement lies et se supposent I’un l’autre’, and, on the
other hand, the author claims the impossibility of grasping ‘le tout global du
langage’, insists on a strict bifurcation of the inquiry into langue and parole, and
even declares the latter as the sole object of linguistics proper. Although this
restrictive program still finds its theoretical adherents, in fact the absolute
separation of the two aspects turns into a recognition of two different hierarchic
relations: an analysis of the code with due regard for the messages, and vice
versa. Without a confrontation of the code with the messages, no insight into the
creative power of language can be achieved. Saussure’s definition of langue as
‘la partie sociale du langage, extkrieure A l’individu’ in opposition to parole as
a mere individual act does not consider the existence of a personal code which
removes the temporal discontinuity of the single speech events and which
confirms the preservation of the individual, the permanence and identity of his
ego; nor does he take into account the interpersonal, social, mutually adaptive
nature of the ‘circuit de la parole’ which implies the participation of at least two
individuals.
The uniformity of the code, ‘sensibly the same’ for all the members of a speech
community, posited by the Cours and still recalled from time to time, is but a
fiction; as a rule, every individual belongs simultaneously to several speech
communities of different radius and capacity; any overall code is multiform and
comprises a hierarchy of diverse subcodes freely chosen by the speaker with
regard to the function of the message, to its addressee, and to the relation be-
tween the interlocutors. In particular, the subcodes offer a scale of transforms
ranging from explicitness to the gradual degrees of ellipsis. When one-sided
concentration on the cognitive, referential function of language gave way to an
examination of its other, likewise primordial, underivable functions, the prob-
lems of the code-massage relationship .showed much greater subtlety and multi-
valence.
La langue, according to the Cours, ‘must be studied in itself’, and it ‘never
requires premeditation’ on the part of speakers. The new rapid progress of
applied linguistics with such items as language planning and policy, language
teaching, communication engineering, etc., is a natural and predictable offshoot
of the modern goal-oriented linguistic thought, but it remains alien to Saussure’s
view of linguistic science and to the predominant scholarly ideology of his time.