1 – Linguistics Starting from the CLG: Empiricism and Theory

Organizer : GABRIEL BERGOUNIOUX, Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique, Université d’Orléans.

Page web : http://www.lll.cnrs.fr/gabriel-bergounioux

DESCRIPTION OF THE SESSION

With his Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (1879), Saussure demonstrated the heuristic potential of comparativism. With the Course in General Linguistics, he opened up an essential version of the structuralism that, through the diversity of its objects of study and the breadth of its considerations, succeeded in being claimed as their own by phonologists as much as by semiologists, philosophers of language and grammarians.

This session has combined papers concerning current developments in comparativism and historical linguistics on the one hand, and on the other, contemporary research issuing from:

1. new models proposed since the 1960s (phonologies, morphologies and formal syntaxes in particular),
2. transformations of linguistics resulting from an increasing documentation of languages (typology, theory of universals and modes of variation, corpus linguistics),
3. fields of application and development  (computational linguistics, forensic linguistics, semiology…),
4. research conducted at the interface with other disciplines (anthropology, psychoanalysis, neurology…).

Particular attention has been payed to the testing of theories by seeing how they hold up in the face of data from one or more languages, in either the synchronic or the diachronic domain. The ambition was for the papers given in this session to map out landmarks for a cartography of problems and methods, to work out how we can represent the way in which linguistic work currently operates in the analysis of systems and their realizations, in synchrony and in diachrony.

PLENARY SPEAKER

Raffaele SIMONE, Professeur émérite, Université Roma Tre : L'élaboration des idées-phares de Saussure. Continuation et discontinuité

Selected papers for parallel sessions