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Linguistics 459
Saussure followed Kruszewski in teaching that the ‘generative’ operations
of language involve two kinds of relations - one, relying upon selection, was
characterized by him as ‘associative’, ‘intuitive’, or ‘paradigmatic’, while the
other, based on combination, was named ‘syntagmatic’ or ‘discursive’. The
terms ‘paradigmatic’ and ‘syntagmatic’ have entered into general use, but the
interpretation of these two notions and of their interdependence has undergone
significant changes. The Cours affirmed that the members of a paradigmatic
series have no fixed order ‘et c’est par un acte purement arbitraire que le
grammairien les groupe d‘une faqon plut6t que d’une autre’; at present, however,
this agnostic habit is being supplanted by an insight into the objective
stratification within any series which displays a set of correlations between
‘markedness’ and ‘unmarkedness’ or, in a different formulation, between relatively
nuclear (‘deep’) and relatively marginal structures.
For Saussure, syntax ‘rentre dans la syntagmatique’, and no clear-cut boundary
between facts of langue and parole may be found in syntactic structures.
The linguistics of today has exhibited a lucid distinction between the totally
coded words and the coded matrices of the sentences; so-called transformational
grammar is viewed as an auspicious extension of a paradigmatic analysis to the
sphere of syntax. The dual system of syntagmatic and paradigmatic solidarities
proves to be applicable also to the developing studies in the makeup of multisentential
utterances and dialogues. The philological interpretation of entire
texts enters gradually into the orbit of linguistics, and the chasm ‘between the
two sciences’ - linguistics and philology - signaled in the Cows becomes obliterated.
With the widening and deepening of paradigmatic analysis, the interconnection
between grammatical ‘processes’ and ‘concepts’, in Sapir’s terms, assumes
ever greater importance, and properties of different grammatical levels prove
again and again to play a pertinent role in semantic interpretation. The heightened
interest in the manifold questions of context throws a new light on the
pivotal, though long neglected, question of linguistic semantics, the relation of
contextual meanings to the general meaning. Semantic analysis of language
finds a powerful tool in the study of metalinguistic messages, which were until
recently dismissed.
The difference between two linguistic disciplines - synchronic and diachronic -
was clearly outlined and exemplified by Baudouin de Courtenay throughout the
last third of the nineteenth century. Influenced by Brentano’s lectures on descriptive
psychology as a new and guiding discipline to supplement the traditional
field of genetic psychology, Marly and Masaryk in the middle eighties advocated
the need for a synchronic description as the first and chief linguistic task and as
an indispensable premise to the history of language. According to Saus sure’s
Cours, the radical, inner duality of synchrony and diachrony threatens linguistics
with particular difficulties and calls for a complete separation of the
two aspects: what can be investigated is either the coexistent relations within
the linguistic system ‘d‘o~ toute intervention du temps est exclue’ or single
successive changes without any reference to the system. In other words, Saussure
anticipated and announced a new, structural approach to linguistic syn-