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

Séminaire de 3e cycle

-- Mardi 6 décembre 2005 Vladislava REZNIK (London // Post-doc. Lausanne) :
Space Exploration: The Emergence of the Category of Space in European Linguistics

This paper looks at the emergence of linguistic geography as a distinct branch of linguistic science in the early twentieth century. The first part of the paper describes the predominance of the category of time in the nineteenth-century linguistics, concerned with the study of the evolution of languages and epitomized in such temporal analytical models as August Schleicher’s genealogical language family tree, or the Neogrammarian sound laws, which were applied to analyze the historical changes of grammatical forms. It is further demonstrated how Johannes Schmidt’s Wave theory and the progress of practical dialectology had led to the recognition of the importance of the spatial factor in the study of languages and the first formulation of the principles of linguistic geography proper, credited to Jules Gilliéron and Edmond Edmont and their acclaimed Atlas linguistique de la France (1902-1915).

The main argument of the paper is, however, centred on the two other linguistic doctrines of the 1920s and 1930s, namely, the Neolinguistic school in Italy and the Eurasian movement of Russian émigrés in Europe. The paper examines how the category of space became an organizing factor of their corresponding lingua-geographical models of the world, which are broadly characterized as ‘a geographical model of space’ and ‘a geometrical model of space’. The Neolinguists made geography a central element of their linguistic investigations, as they sought to explain a chronological, temporal, relation between two linguistic facts with the help of a geographical classification of linguistic areas (isolated, lateral, major, posterior and extinct). They argued that a historical evolution of language should be studied both in time and space, as linguistic innovations, understood as the main source of language change, irradiate in space and the degree of their expansion depends both on geographical and socio-historical factors. Focusing on the category of space and geographical proximity, the Neolinguists suggested the existence of language unions (lega linguistica) between genetically unrelated but geographically adjacent languages, which exhibit a number of similarities acquired in the process of language contacts and mixtures.

The Neolinguistic concept of language unions, seemingly similar to Nikolai Trubetzkoy’s famous iazykovoi soiuz and Roman Jakobson’s Eurasian phonological union, is in fact totally different from it. It is the contrasting ideosophical platform of the Eurasian theory, that allows us to characterize their worldview as ‘geometrical’, where the closed totality of the Eurasian union of languages is opposed to the rest of the world languages and is placed at the centre of a symmetrical picture. Contrary to the open and borderless Neolinguistic world, the one presented by the Eurasists consists of strictly defined centres and peripheries, and the existence of language unions is explained by parallel developments and convergences, rather than by contacts and mixtures. The paper seeks to demonstrate the ideological differences between the two platforms, which underlie their respective concepts of language union, by looking at such contrastive pairs, as accidental vs teleological evolution of language, individual linguistic creativity vs subjugation of the individual to the collective, openness and mixed character of languages and cultures vs uniqueness and totality, absence of centres and peripheries vs their presence. 

Finally, the paper suggests possible directions of future research, in relation to a ‘sociological model of space’ which combines investigations in geographical and social dialectology.