Читать книгу Resilience - Sandrine Robert - Страница 16

The survival of the past in the present was formalized, in scientific terms, in the area of linguistics in the 19th century. In the specific field of historical etymology, the state of a language at a time t is considered to be derived from a “source” language, and all linguistic phenomena are considered to “carry within them the trace of their past”¹¹ (Ducrot and Schaeffer 1995, p. 334). Ferdinand de Saussure refined this definition in relation to time in his Course of General Linguistics, introducing the term diachronie (diachrony) (de Saussure 1995a, p. 117)¹². Formed from the Greek dia, through, and chronos, time, this realm of linguistics describes the successive states of a language and the phenomena which cause a language to shift from one state to another. Above and beyond its methodological implications, diachrony implies a certain vision of time. In Saussure’s view, time is responsible for a dual phenomenon of “mutability and immutability”, in which signs may be altered by time while retaining certain elements:

[…] linguistic changes do not correspond to generations of speakers. There is no vertical structure of layers one above the other like drawers in a piece of furniture; people of all ages intermingle and communicate with one another. (de Saussure 1995b, Part I, Chapter II, § 1)

The state of a language is thus, in part, inherited from the language’s past. The notion of diachrony can be used to take change into account, while retaining links to the past, using the postulate that certain persistent elements establish a type of continuum across and between different periods.