Centre de recherches en histoire et épistémologie comparée de la linguistique d'Europe centrale et orientale (CRECLECO) // Université de Lausanne

Patrick SERIOT 19 mars 2004. Conférence à la Central European University (Budapest) :

«Space vs Time : Geography and Geometry in Roman Jakobson's Eurasian Phonology»

- R. Jakobson's linguistics is known in the West as classical structuralism, as a part of "Western thought". Nonetheless a great number of his statements about language in the interwar period cannot be understood without referring to the romantic notion of "totality", to an idealistic vision of space, linked to German geopolitics, which in its turn goes back to the vision of ordered space in Carl Ritter's works, and finally to a platonistic vision of space. Prague school's structuralism in nearer German romanticism, Goethe and Hegel than it may seem.



- Patrick SERIOT is a professor of Slavic linguistics at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). He has worked in the field of the analysis of Soviet political discourse. He is now a specialist in compared epistemology of the discourse on language in Central and Eastern Europe.