linguistics - jakobson, roman - sign and system of language - a reassessment of saussure's doctrine

8/6/2019 Linguistics - Jakobson, Roman - Sign and System of Language - A Reassessment of Saussure's Doctrine

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34 ROMAN JAKOBSONwords of one root is decisive, and where it becomes impossible to speak aboutarbitrariness. In morphophonological issues, the question of similar structures isof primary importance when we recognize that there exist certain models, certainstructural types of the distribution and selection of phonemes in roots, and othertypes of prefixes or suffixes of derivation and conjugation. Finally, the issue ofsound symbolism, on which I shall not further dwell here, remains, in spite of a11skepticism voiced in the past, an important and fascinating problem in the studyof language. And so are a11 questions concerning the foundation of languagesymbols in image and indication (or, as Charles Sanders Pierce, the pioneer ofthe theory of signs, would have said: the problem of iconicor indexicalsymbols).It seems to me that the second principle in Saussure's Cours, the so-calledlinarit, must also be seen as a dangerous simplification. Actually we encountertwo-dimensional units not only on the level of the signatum, as demonstrated byCh. Bally, but also in the field of the signans. If we recognize that the phoneme isnot the ultimate unit of language, but can be decomposed into distinctive fea-tures, then it becomes self-evident that we may speak in phonology too about twodimensions, (as we have accords in music), the dimensions of successivity and ofsimultaneity. This, however, must lead to abandoning a number of Saussure'stheses on basic laws of language structure. Thus, I believe that the term "syntag-matic" is often misleading, since when referring to syntagmatic relations we thinkof successivity in time; however, besides the combination in temporal succession,we must deal also with combination of simultaneous features. It would be advis-able in this respect to speak simply about combination, seen as contrasted byanother factor, namely, selection. Selection of units or of combinations, incontrast to combination per se, belongs to the paradigmatic level of language. Itis substitution, as distinguished from both simultaneity and successivity. Inselection, the principle of equivalence, or association by similarity, asserts itself.While observing the paradigmatic axes rather than successivity and simultaneity,I do not believe that we abandon the domain of the objective and plunge intosubjectivity. Linguistic researches of recent years have shown that in this area anobjective stratification, a hierarchy of components, exists. One encounters herethe problem of predictability, the problem of primary and secondary functions,which has been outlined brilliantly by Kurytowicz in the thirties and which hasbeen recently developed in America in the theory of syntactical transformations- one of the rnost topical problerns of linguistic analysis. At the sarne time, theeven more important and indispensable question arises, as to the relationship andthe difference between paradigmatic series and combinational series (chains orclusters).We deal here, apparently, as in a11 modern sciences, with the significant idea ofinvariance. We speak about combinational, context-dependent variants on thelevel of sound as well as on the level of gramrnar. But it would be impossible tospeak about variants as long as we have not clarified the nature of the basicinvariant, the unit to which a11 these variants are related. The search for theinvariants is now the most substantial problem not only in phonology, but ingrammar as well. When dealing with the sign, the bilateral signum as a link


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linguistics - jakobson, roman - sign and system of language - a reassessment of saussure's doctrine

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