Linguistic Creativity

Abstract

Course in General Linguistics (1916) is an indispensable "Great Book" in the contemporary canon of ideas. This foundational text laid out an innovative research program in contemporary semiotics and it led to the development of structuralist methods in the humanities. Recent developments in Saussurean scholarship offer multiple venues for developing a critical perspective on this programmatic text. Specifically, the materials from the linguist's Nachlass (works unpublished or unexhibited at Saussure's death, some of them recently discovered) challenge the official doctrine associated with the Course (a posthumous redaction published in 1916 and attributed to Saussure who died in 1913) and with structural linguistics (a "return to Saussure" in the 1950s and 60s France). The official doctrine maps language onto a set of hierarchical oppositions between la langue and la parole, and synchrony and diachrony. According to Saussure's own writings, language intersects structure with speech, and stability with temporal change (Saussure, 2006; Stawarska, 2020, 2015). Instead of a vertical dualism elevating the synchronous structure (the presumed proper object of study in scientific linguistics) above the evolving patterns of use, we find that language has a "double essence" (Saussure, 2006, p. 144) and it exists equally in the present and in the past; furthermore, duality is a "first and last" principle in general linguistics (p. 3). This inescapable duality is rendered more concrete in this essay by studying linguistic creativity, specifically, innovation by analogy.