The linguistics of the 1900s from Ferdinand de Saussure to Gustave Guillaume between synchrony and diachrony

Rocco Pititto

pp. 203-209

in: Flavia Santoianni (ed), The concept of time in early twentieth-century philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 2016

Abstract

According to Gustave Guillaume, a linguist endowed with incontestable speculative depth, though misunderstood by the linguists and philosophers of his time and rather ignored in linguistic textbooks, language has a temporal architecture, determined by the articulation of time, which from the present, is projected into the future, while having and maintaining its roots in the past. The present is only the interval between the past and the future. As such, time, however, cannot be represented by way of itself: it requires a representation that can only be made via spatial instruments. Guillaume has the merit of having considered human language in the temporal dimension of thought operations, causing it to become an interpretive paradigm of language itself. This is a paradigm able to give a sufficiently well-founded explanation for a series of linguistic phenomena, otherwise lacking sufficient explanation. The theoretical principles on which Guillaume founds his discourse on comprehension, refer to three aspects in particular: operative time, the central concept of Guillaume's approach to the problems of language, the reciprocity of the relationship between language and discourse, and the idea of succession in the process of constructing language.

Cited authors

de Saussure Ferdinand

Guillaume Gustave