Reading Saussure: A Critical Commentary on the Cours De Linquistique Generale [Hardcover]

Roy Harris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1987 | ISBN-10: 0812690494 | ISBN-13: 978-0812690491

Within five years of the publication of Saussure's Course in General Linguistics in 1916, the work had become compulsory reading for all linguists, as it remains today. Saussure's new approach, which became known as Structuralism, came to be applied in philosophy, literary criticism, folklore, anthropology, art, architecture, and even economics. With the sole exception of Wittgenstein, no thinker has had as deep an influence on modern views of man as language-user as Saussure. But many readers of Saussure have been baffled by its seeming inconsistencies and loose ends, and interpretations of the Course differ strikingly. Doubts have been exacerbated by the difficulty of determining how much of the Course is due to Saussure himself, and how much to his posthumous editors. In this extremely detailed, unpretentious, and lucid commentary, Roy Harris gives a page-by-page analysis of Saussure's argument, together with an explanation of Saussure's relation to earlier and later writers, an evaluation of all the major rival interpretations of Saussure, and an assessment of the reliability of the text. Reading Saussure contains explanations of the many vexed questions which had dogged the Course, including the relationship between linguistics and semiology, the distinction between langue and parole, the significance of Saussure's quarrel with the "nomenclaturists," the difference between "internal" and "external" elements, and the authenticity of the Course's final sentence: "The only true object of study in linguistics is the language, considered in itself and for its own sake."

Product Details

• Hardcover: 248 pages
• Publisher: Open Court Pub Co (August 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812690494
• ISBN-13: 978-0812690491
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,801,189 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review of Harris, _Reading Saussure_, January 17, 2001

By 

Kenneth L. Miner - See all my reviews

This review is from: Reading Saussure: A Critical Commentary on the Cours De Linquistique Generale (Hardcover)

Review of Harris, _Reading Saussure_

It is high time to expose distortions and misuses of the sciences on the part of deconstructionists, postmodernists, and the general lot of fashionable nihilists who make up such a large part of today's academic world. What Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont have done for physics in this regard (_Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science_, 1998) now needs to be done for the much more central prop of much of this recent thought, "linguistics." I place the word in quotes because it is not the last century of actual linguistic research and theory-building that is so often appealed to in postist writings, but rather the ideas contained, or thought to be contained, in the 1916 _Course in General Linguistics_ of Ferdinand de Saussure.

Harris's book might well be a foundation for such an exposure, though it has no such intention. The author's aim in this work was simply to sum up the oversights, incoherencies and inconsistencies in Saussure's _Course_ which have been noted within the field from the beginning, to state them with maximum clarity, and to add some criticisms of his own. Unfortunately for its impact, _Reading Saussure_ is aimed at professional linguists, or at least at readers with some linguistics background, and may be unsuitable for the general reader.

Here is a quote from Ian Saunders which sums up, in an unusually clear fashion (I hope), what deconstruction owes to Saussure's flawed _Course_ (which by the way was never written nor intended for publication by him):

[begin quote] Saussure... insisted that words derive their meanings from their location within a system of other words... If a word has its meaning only by virtue of other words, then we could say that its meaning is its difference from other words. Take any word, then, and you could argue that its meaning is not _present_ in it, but only fixed by those _absent_ other words. 'Fixed' is not quite right, though, because if we recover the absent sign we don't get its meaning. After all, that is its difference from yet other signs. And so on. One sign leads to another, different sign, but with each arrival we find not meaning, but its deferral (Derrida coins the word _différance_ to suggest the intertwining of differ and defer). Instead of fixed, final or closed meaning, deconstruction sees openings, a chain of signifiers that offers movement from one signifier to the next, without ever settling on the one term (the 'transcendental signified') that would constitute bedrock. (_Open Texts, Partial Maps_, 1993, pp. 21, 22) [end quote]

Here is the same idea from Derrida himself:

[begin quote] Whether in written or spoken discourse, no element can function as a sign without relating to another element which is not simply present. This linkage means that each "element"--phoneme or grapheme--is constituted with reference to the trace in it of the other elements of the sequence or system. This linkage, this weaving, is the text, which is produced only through the transformation of another text. Nothing, either in the elements or in the system, is anywhere simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces. (_Positions_, 1981, p. 26 of U. of Chicago Press edition) [end quote]

All this is built on particular naïve and wholly uncritical understandings and misunderstandings of Saussure's _Course_ by people working in disciplines other than linguistics. For why it doesn't work, even for linguistics, and why it is a disaster _especially_ when extended to considerations of meaning, see Harris's _Reading Saussure_. But I warn again, the book is technical and not a popularization.

For linguistics itself, Harris's book is of mainly historical interest, though it is one of the two or three best books I have read in the field, whence the high rating. Saussure's model of language did not survive in the 20th century, even in phonology, where his notion of a system of pure oppositions comes closest to working.

Deconstructionism and postmodernism have had, as any working linguist can tell you, almost no impact on linguistics itself; this will, I hope, be made even clearer in some forthcoming work by Frederick Newmeyer.

Ken Miner