Problems in General Linguistics

by Émile Benveniste, Mary Elizabeth Meek (Translator)

The studies collected in this volume were chosen from among many others of a more technical nature which the author has published during the last few years. If they are here presented as "problems," it is because individually and as a group they make a contribution to the broad general problem of language as revealed in the principal topics taken up; we have considered the relations between the biological and the cultural, subjectivity and sociality, sign and object a, and symbol and thought , as well as problems of intralinguistic analysis.

Genres: Linguistics, Philosophy, Language, Theory, Academic, Nonfiction, College

317 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Émile Benveniste (French: [bɛ̃venist]; 27 March 1902 – 3 October 1976) was a French structural linguist and semiotician. He is best known for his work on Indo-European languages and his critical reformulation of the linguistic paradigm established by Ferdinand de Saussure.

Reviews

[Christopher Paludi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to this text seeking insight into PIE, the middle voice, and nominal sentence. Wonderfully, I also found: delocutive verbs, the recent development of “to be,” “we” not as multiplication of “I”s but as annexation of the third person, and much more. Benveniste writes so clearly that with some background, he is comprehensible.

The middle of the book truly shone: “The Nominal Sentence,” “Active and Middle Voice in the Verb,” “The Passive Construction of the Transitive Perfect,” and “The Linguistic Functions of ‘To Be’ and ‘To Have’” excellently bring the reader through a dizzying variety of languages. For example, I didn’t expect to encounter Aramaic, but such are the pleasures of this work.

Yet I will warn that Benveniste rarely translates from Greek, Latin, or French, and that casual familiarity with European etymologies is almost necessary. I cannot say that I would have gotten nearly as much from these articles had I no familiarity with Russian and French—Russian for the function of verb declensions (I lack the usual Latin experience) and French for Benviste’s writing itself.

Ultimately, if languages and thus humanity is your thing, I recommend Benviste.

[Philippe Malzieu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to speak about Benvéniste for his brilliant dictionary of the Indo-European institutions. It does not appear in the list. From my point of view, it is the essential complement of the ideology of the 3 functions described by Dumézil.
This work takes again the methodology of Benvéniste. It approaches the teaching linguistics of way and allows us to understand the origin of the languages.
The dictionary studies the same functions (justice royalty crowned…)in various European people indo-européan. For exemple sacral is defined by 2 words everywhere, of Iranian to the Romans. Among Greeks, it is hieros and hagios: what is touched by God but also what is interdict to secular.
Benveniste is precious to allow us to understand not only language origin but also social organisation and especially religion.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compiling a set of Benveniste's most accessible texts, this presents a good overview of his work. Beginning by situating himself in the wake of the Saussurean revolution, he nevertheless breaks from Saussure in a similar manner to Lacan (challenging the arbitrariness of the relation between signifier and signified). The clarification regarding the phoneme as an algebraic unit in Saussure's discovery of the "sonantic" a and the subsequent development of phonology as a branch of linguistics by Jakobson is useful, as is the distinction he insists upon between bee communication and human language. He challenges Freud on his linguistic citations, searching for homologies for oneiric logic in surrealist poetry and mythological folklore instead of in the development of "primitive" languages, repudiating Freud on his fixation on a search for "origins", which is fair enough, for he also acknowledges that Freud himself realizes this as well. The parallel he draws between the nominal and the verbal sentence on the one hand, and the verbs ser and estar in Spanish, I found insightful. I also appreciate the engagement with Pāṇini on Sanskrit in the section on active and middle verbs. However, I think I have a hesitation similar to Derrida's: it is hard to extract a "methodology" from this set of articles, which leaves the relation between the synchronic and the diachronic ambiguous, since Benveniste often falls back on empirical, historical data regarding linguistic evolution/development to buttress his arguments, a sort of "pre-structuralist" paradigm: in other words, it is unclear to me just how different a comparison on the basis of a formalist/functionalist analysis of "synchronic" snapshots is from comparative linguistics in general.

[Calvin Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

fuck you dude saussure clears

[Leonardo]

Aquí resulta útil una referencia al famoso análisis de Emile Benveniste de las formas activas, pasivas y neutras del verbo: los verdaderos opuestos no son activo y pasivo (con la forma neutra como la mediadora entre los dos extremos), sino activo y neutro (opuestos en el eje inclusión / exclusión del sujeto en la acción realizada por el verbo), mientras que la forma pasiva funciona como el tercer término que niega el terreno común de las dos primeras.

Viviendo en el Final de los Tiempos Pág.236

[Cpjuri]

meeeeeh

[Marko]

I have a slovenian edition.