Émile Benveniste

Émile Benveniste ( born May 27, 1902 in Aleppo, Syria; † October 3, 1976 in Paris) was a French linguist in the tradition of de Saussure's structuralism. A collection of essays titled Benveniste Problèmes de linguistique générale ( German: Problems in General Linguistics ). He also gained importance by exploring the grammar of the Indo-European languages ​​, as well as Iranological and Indo-European etymology and onomastics.

Life

The pupil of Antoine Meillet taught from 1927 at the École pratique des hautes études. In the 30's the beginning of his collaboration with Jerzy Kurylowicz falls. In 1937 he receives at the Collège de France, the Department of General Linguistics and Comparative Grammar, which he will hold until his death. In 1959 he became a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Main theses

In his problems Benveniste developed corrections of structuralism of Saussure. Unlike Saussure, Benveniste holds the relationship between signifier and signified, and between signifier and referent not arbitrary, but for rule determined. Signifier and signified have quite a common third, namely, in so far are both representations in the human mind. There they are " consubstantial ", verähnelt from psychological need each other. Episode one Saussure and postulate that the signified a concept (such as ' the cow ') and the signifier, the phonetic pattern ( " ku " ) represents, then, the question of arbitrariness imagine not, because within the human mind both elements only are respectively a side of the same coin described and therefore necessarily connected.

Benveniste illustrates the various examples. About the dichotomy I / not-I ( ever / non -je ): expressions like these have only in the context of a single utterance an actual speakers (they are " contingent sale "). Nevertheless, they have a language system also general: they highlight features such as subjectivity and personhood; in this they are set out above all others linguistic signs. The source of subjectivity in the language is, according to Benveniste, the overall structure of the pronouns that possessed within the lexicon has no specific meaning, but only in sale -dependent contexts. The pronouns of the first and second person are different in their functioning significantly from those of the third person: the former calls Benveniste deictic, anaphoric the latter.

Deictic features characterize by Benveniste a "subjective" language mode, the personal colored discours, opposite the ' objective ' histoire. The histoire reached this objectification by. Said utterance content ( énoncé ) of enunciation ( énonciation ), ie the personalizable and deictic kontextualisierbaren dimension of an utterance, abstracted, so the style or the ' authorship ' of a language producers In contrast, the énoncé pure information, or better yet, the language itself; the énoncé does not require a communication model of sender and receiver. By the terms of histoire and discours Benveniste seeks the juxtaposition of text types: subjective- contextualized as everyday conversations, speeches, letters, and poetry; objective- abstracted as history, law, and especially the novel. Benveniste calls for it to consider the language not merely as a collection of signs and sign usage rules, but always also as an activity of communication with propositional content.

Effect

Benveniste applies According to AC Graham as the first linguist who claimed the dependence of the Aristotelian categories of the structure of the Greek language: these categories did not exist in reality but are a projection of certain linguistic typologies of Greek at the reality. Benveniste also pointed to the importance of the concept of 'being' in the Indo-European languages ​​out: mean only in these languages ​​the copula 'being' at the same time, existence ' and ' identity ' - an insight that went on especially in the philosophy of language, attention.

Benveniste's theory of discourse found resonance in the speech and narrative theory, but especially in literary theory, such as Barthes, Kristeva, Todorov and Harald Weinrich. Terry Eagleton took the histoire - discours - dichotomy for his theory of political subtext: énoncé and énonciation tried, mutually to push for political reasons in the background. The most comprehensive elaboration of the model can be found in the narrative theory Gerard Genette.