Émile Benveniste

Émile Benveniste (born May 27, 1902 in Aleppo , Syria , † October 3, 1976 in Paris ) was a French linguist .

Life

Benveniste was born into a Sephardic-Jewish family in Aleppo, Syria. At his father's request, he went to Marseille to study for the rabbinate. However, Sylvain Lévi recognized his extraordinary abilities and introduced him to Antoine Meillet .

As a student of Antoine Meillet, he taught at the École pratique des hautes études from 1927 . He began working with Jerzy Kuryłowicz in the 1930s . In 1937 he received the chair for general linguistics and comparative grammar at the Collège de France . In 1959 he became a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences .

Beneniste's areas of work were the research of the Indo-European languages , especially Iranian studies , and general linguistics . He stood in the tradition of the French linguistics Antoine Meillets, which refers in particular to Ferdinand de Saussure . A collection of Benveniste's most important essays on general linguistics is entitled Problèmes de linguistique générale (German: Problems of General Linguistics ).

Main theses

Criticism of Saussure's concept of the arbitrariness of the sign

In his problems , Benveniste developed corrections to Ferdinand de Saussure's drawing theory. In contrast to Saussure, Benveniste considers the relationship between the signifier and the signified and between the signified and the referent of a linguistic sign not to be arbitrary , but rather to be determined by rules. Significant and signified would have a third thing in common, namely insofar as both are representations in the human mind. There they are "consubstantial", similar to one another out of psychological necessity. If you follow Saussure and postulate that the signified represents a concept (such as 'the cow') and the signifier represents the phonetic pattern ("ku"), then the question of arbitrariness does not arise at all, since within the human mind only both elements each one side of the same coin are described and therefore necessarily linked. Benveniste's Saussure interpretation is rejected as wrong in recent literature.

Deixis and Subjectivity in Language

Personal pronouns of the 1st and 2nd person only have an actual referent in the context of a single utterance (they are "utterance contingents"). Nevertheless, they also have generality in a language system: they mark features such as subjectivity and personality; in it they are emphasized above all other linguistic signs. According to Benveniste, the source of subjectivity in language is the structure of the pronouns as a whole, which have no specific meaning within the lexicon , but only in utterance-dependent contexts. The functioning of the first and second person pronouns is essentially different from that of the third person: Benveniste calls the former deictic , the latter anaphoric .

Theory of expression

According to Benveniste, deictic features characterize a 'subjective' mode of language, the personally colored discours , as opposed to the 'objective' histoire . The histoire achieves this objectification by abstracting the utterance content ( énoncé ) from the énonciation , i.e. the personalizable and deictically contextualizable dimension of an utterance. Benveniste advocates viewing language not just as a collection of signs and rules for the use of signs, but also as an activity of communication with semantic content.

effect

Benveniste examined the dependence of the Aristotelian categories on the Greek language. The categories, he claimed, were not ontologically founded, but were read from the grammatical structures of Greek. The philosophical question of being has to do with the special meaning of the concept of ' being ' in the Indo-European languages, because in these languages ​​the copula means both 'existence' and 'identity'.

Benveniste's discourse theory found resonance in narrative theory (e.g. in Gérard Genette ) and in literary theory, e.g. in Brooke-Rose , Barthes , Kristeva , Todorov and Harald Weinrich . Terry Eagleton used the distinction between histoire and discours for his theory of the political subtext: énoncé and énonciation tried to push each other into the background for political reasons.

literature

Works

• Essai de grammaire sogdienne (Paris 1929)
• Origines de la formation des noms en indo-européen (Paris 1935)
• Noms d'agent et noms d'action en indo-européen (Paris 1948)
• Problèmes de linguistique générale I (Paris 1966)
  • "Problems of General Linguistics", List-Verlag (Munich 1974)
  • “Problems of General Linguistics”, Syndicate Authors and Verl.-Ges. (Frankfurt am Main 1977)
• Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes (2 vols., Paris 1969)
  • Indo-European institutions. Vocabulary, history, functions. Campus, Frankfurt am Main and New York, 1993
• Problèmes de linguistique générale II (Paris 1974)
• Baudelaire. Édition établie par Chloé Laplantine, Lambert-Lucas, Limoges, 2011
• Dernières leçons. Edition établie par J.-C. Coquet & I. Fenoglio, EHESS-Gallimard-Seuil, Paris, 2012
  • Last lectures. Collège de France 1968 and 1969. Edited by Jean-Claude Coquet ... Translated from the French by Thomas Laugstien. With a foreword by Julia Kristeva and an afterword by Tzvetan Todorov , Diaphanes-Verlag, Zurich / Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-03734-427-9

Secondary literature

• Supplement "Polyphonic Linguistics. The Many Voices of Émile Benveniste" for Semiotica 1981.
• Janine Böckelmann: The semiotics of the social. The language concept by Émile Benveniste. Hagen: Fernuniversität 2014 (also Diss. Univ. Hagen 2014). URN: urn: nbn: de: hbz: 708-29387
• Terry Eagleton : Literary Theory . An introduction. Stuttgart and Weimar ??.
• Julia Kristeva : Epistémologie de la linguistique. Homage to Émile Benveniste. Paris 1971.
• G. Serbat (ed.): Émile Benveniste aujourd'hui. Paris 1984.

Web links

• Literature by and about Émile Benveniste in the catalog of the German National Library
• Benveniste and Bühler (PDF; 179 kB). A Comparative Introduction to Benveniste's Theory of Linguistic Subjectivity

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Simon Bouquet: Benveniste et la représentation du sens: de l'arbitraire du signe à l'objet extra-linguistique . In: LINX, 1997, n ° special: Emile Benveniste vingt ans après, pp. 107–123; Silvia B. Garcia: On the concept of arbitrariness bel F. de Saussure. An exegetical-philological investigation . Munster 1997.