2 - Saussure

Summary

The confident belief of linguists such as William Labov and Walt Wolfram (cited in Chapter 1) that they share an “understanding of the nature of language” comes, according to Francis Dinneen, from foundational work in the field (1967: 18):

the language of linguistics is set by linguists, and not all linguists share the same background and interests … Despite the individual differences or interests, as well as different national traditions, all linguists share a basic understanding and agreement as the result of the influential work of scholars like de Saussure, Troubetzkoy, Martinet, and others among the European scholars, and Boas, Sapir, Bloomfield, Harris, Pike, Hockett, and Chomsky among the Americans.

This statement occurs at the beginning of a book still notable for its accounts of historical divisions in the history of ideas about language, such as etymology vs. prescriptive grammar vs. traditional grammar vs. linguistics, and its accounts of the varied contributions of half a dozen twentieth-century linguists, from Saussure to Bloomfield to Firth to Chomsky. As we have seen in Chapter 1, and as Dinneen's accounts themselves demonstrate, it may be difficult in practice to find the shared understanding between Bloomfieldian structuralism and Chomskyan generativism in America, and between either of those and the NeoFirthians in Britain. And yet Dinneen may have a point.