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(1981) Histoire Épistémologie Langage 3 (2).
Hans AARSLEFF: Bréal, la sémantique et Saussure. This essay presents an extension of arguments 1 have advanced in essays on «Bréal vs. Schleicher» and «Taine and Saussure». It is devoted to Bréal's linguistic thought, based both on the late Essai de sémantique and on his earlier essays, dating from the late 1860' s, on the same subject. The essay argues that Bréal's ' sémantique' is a ' linguistique générale', and that it was directed against Schleicher's organicism and its consequences. Bréal shifted the emphasis to the mindbound nature of language and linguistic processes, and in this context he developed concepts that recur in Saussure's linguistic thought as presented in the Cours. Thus we find in Bréal a conceptualization that includes such Saussurean concepts as diachrony, synchrony, valeur, structure, binary opposition, and syntagmatics. The essay argues that Saussure owed a substantial debt to Bréal. It is further argued that Bréal's thought is an expression of the late 19th-century reaction against the residue of romantic thought in scholarship. This turn of mind is best known under the term already then used: le réalisme.
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Full citation:
Aarsleff, H. (1981). Bréal, la sémantique et Saussure. Histoire Épistémologie Langage 3 (2), pp. 115-133.
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