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Centre de recherches en histoire et épistémologie comparée de la linguistique d'Europe centrale et orientale (CRECLECO) / Université de Lausanne // Научно-исследовательский центр по истории и сравнительной эпистемологии языкознания центральной и восточной Европы

Cercle linguistique d'Edimbourg (Prof. Lara Ryasanova-Clark) :
- Exposé de Patrick Sériot : 'The Question of the Language Picture of the World in Eastern European Linguistics'
In our time of globalization, strangely enough, modernity is being more and more questioned. Contrary to 'hard sciences', where a new theory can falsify an older one, in linguistics no falsifyability seems possible. Old theories regularly come back to the surface. So is the case with neo-humboldtianism in Eastern Europe, under the strange name of cognitivism, but with concepts like "jazykovaja kartina mira" or "jazykovoe soderzhanie", which are literal translations of Leo Weisgerber's "Sprachweltbild" and "Sprachinhaltforschung".
The renewal of neohumboldtianism in Russia and Eastern Europe now is poorly known in the "West". It is nonetheless interesting to study, because 1) it reveals a lot about the instrumentalization of linguistics in the post-communist area for a nationalistic agenda; 2) it raises important questions about the relationship between form and meaning; 3) it points to the relationship between culture and science (the Eastern Church has a very specific attitude towards the sign).
We will pay attention to the rebuttal of the concept of "arbitrariness" and to the consequences of the dismissal of the notion of "discourse" in those theories of the conditioning of thought by language.