Expression and signification

1. Introductory remarks

Published in 1927 by a little-known, sociologically-minded Soviet linguist, the following text can be appropriately summarised as a relatively straightforward discussion of Edmund Husserl's first logical investigation, Expression and Signification - its main original feature apparently consisting only of a brief comparison of Husserl's phenomenology of the sign with Saussure's “social” conception of langue. It would be just as accurate and probably fairer, however, to present Šor's text as a complex historical document providing instructive contextual insight into an intellectual process that went well beyond Husserl or Saussure themselves: the critical reception of late 19th and early 20th Century German philosophical, psychological or linguistic thought in Russia and its subsequent transformation there into traditions or paradigms such as pheno­menology of language and structural or marxist linguistics.

The clearest indication that there is more to Šor's text than first meets the eye is that neither Husserl nor the Logical Investigations are mentioned explicitly at any point. Rather, it is the gist of Šor's argument itself, along with the title of her article (a literal Russian translation of the original Ausdruck und Bedeutung) and a raft of technical terms quoted in German (Ausdruck, Anzeichen, Kundgabe, Bedeutungsintention, Bedeutungserfüllung...) that unequivocally point to Husserl. It is not clear whether – one year before Stalin's “Great Turn“ – this omission was a strategy adopted by Šor to pre-empt politically dangerous accusations of idealism, or if she intended thereby to conflate Husserl's ideas with the idio­syncratic interpretation given to them in Appearance and Sense by Gustav Špet,Špet 1991 [1914]. her influential colleague at GAChN, the State Academy of the Artistic Sciences.Founded by Vasili Kandinskij in 1921, the GAChN was «an island of relatively independent scholarship and open intellectual debate, and it served as a locus of cultural continuity in the tumultuous period between the Civil War and the first Five Year Plan»(Bird2009). As such, it played a crucial role in enabling debates on phenomenological and formalist approaches to language and literature. But whatever Šor's exact aims, all this highlights how her commentary is tightly woven into the fabric of a rich, implicit context – only three important strands of which can be singled out here.

The most significant of the theoretical undercurrents informing Šor's reading of Husserl is the “Herbarto-Humboldtian“ tradition of psychological linguistics going back to Heyman Steinthal and introduced in Russia by the Ukrainian linguist Aleksandr Potebnja (1835-1891). In Potebnja's work (e.g. Thought and Language [Mysl' i jazyk] 1862), the most reductionistic psycho-physiological models of language and thought are replaced by an etymological approach that attributes an “inner form“ to words, i.e. a sort of culturally and historically sedimented relation that binds a word's verbal, “external form“ to its ideal meaning or “content“. Thanks to Potebnja's influence on Russian linguistics, psychologism was not considered there as a paradigm to be wholly rejected, but rather as a methodological assumption in need of fundamental correction. In contrast to the radical anti-psychologism of Husserl's Logical Investigations, it is precisely such a “corrective” stance that interests Šor. The Symbolist poet Andrej Belyj, who in the early 1910s was one of the first to put forward a non-psychologistic theory of (poetic) language in Russia might have spoken for her when stating that «the psychological foundations of Potebnja's theory do not withstand criticism: but the kernel of his thinking is absolutely correct».Belyj 1910, 254 [my translation]. Šor herself makes a comparable argument with regard to Saussure : «  the linguistic system of Saussure [..] – despite being correct in itself – is in fact derived from obviously erroneous premises » (see below).It is also telling in this regard that when introducing what she calls the new «logicist trend in linguistics», Šor refers first to Anton Marty, for whom the concept of “inner form” was of course also of crucial importance.

A second, related aspect of Šor's discussion of Husserl is the already mentioned influence of Gustav Špet. Špet himself, as is relatively well-known, introduced Husserl's work in Russia and was almost certainly the person who acquainted Šor with phenomenology.cf. Haardt 1992.Just as importantly, Špet shared Šor's interest in Humboldt, Potebnja and Marty.Intererstingly, Špet's The Inner Form of the Word. Studies and Variations on a Humboldtian Theme was also published in 1927.As is made clear in her 1926 book Language and Society [Jazyk i obščestvo], it is primarily by following Špet's ideas and by reinterpreting like him Husserl's concept of the sign through the triadic structure of “external form” - “inner form” - “content”cf. Dennes 2008.that Šor arrived at her concept of the word as «a thing of the culturo-historical world, transferred through tradition by a given collective to a particular member and possessing an objective being independently from each member of the linguistic community».cf. infra. This also explains why, for Šor, a crucial task of linguistics is to reconstitute the cultural (or “paleontological”)A term used by the Soviet linguist Nikolaj Marr (1865-1934) in his “Japhetological” method, which comes very close to the approach suggested here by Šor. Marr was without doubt an important source for Šor, but there is no place here to discuss either the controversial figure of Marr himself or Šor's (admittedly crucial) relation with Marxist linguistics. history of words as they are transmitted and transformed by tradition – a history of language which «[obviously] does not have anything in common with the study of the changes of separate sounds over time (Saussure's diachronic linguistics), with their causal explanation or with the determination of laws regulating these changes in the spirit of the natural sciences».cf. Šor infra.

The third contextual element that requires mention is Šor's intellectual relation to Roman Jakobson. This aspect is the least visible in the present text, but is also one of the most interesting, as it is in Jakobson's “phenomenological structuralism”Holenstein 1976. that Russian contributions to phenomenology of language and structural linguistics found their most successful and influential expression. On the face of it, Šor's arguments seem to fit in perfectly with the well-established accounts that see Husserl's Logical Investigationsand Špet's phenomenology of language as crucial sources for the Prague linguist.cf. e.g. Holenstein 1976, Haardt 1991, Tihanov 2009, Aurora 2015. But in a text published in 1927, The Formal Method in the West [Formal'nyj metod na zapade], Šor expresses a highly critical opinion of the Russian formalist tradition as a whole and of Jakobson in particular.Šor 1927b. Moreover, her point of contention revolves around the central question of the relation between expression and signification: because for her that relation needs to be methodologically explained and guaranteed by a stable, collectively shared socio-cultural tradition of mutual understanding, she condemns the central role attributed by Jakobson to the disruptive, auto­telic poetic function of language, which in her eyes renders expression too independent from signification and from socio-culturally stabilised forms of linguistic meanings.Flack 2016. Rather surprisingly, Husserl's phenomenology of the sign functions thus both as a common source and as a point of disagreement between the two Russian linguists – with Šor insisting on its necessary inter-subjective foundations and Jakobson focussing and building upon its discovery of expression as a specific, potentially productive layer of language.

In short, Šor's text not only casts interesting light on the particularities of the reception and interpretation of Husserl's phenomenology and philosophy of language in Russia. It also underlines the theoretical diversity of the Russian contributions to the epistemological re-foundation of linguistics and the language sciences in the early decades of the 20thCentury. In particular by bringing to the fore instructive divergences between Špet, Jakobson or Šor herself, it offers new insights into the complex, entangled relationship between phenomenology, the still nascent paradigm of structural linguistics, and the psychologistic German traditions of the 19th Century.

2. Rozalija Osipovna Šor (1894-1939)Translated from Sébastien Moret, Patrick Sériot, http://crecleco.seriot.ch/recherche/ENCYCL%20LING%20RU/SHOR/Shor.html

Soviet philologist, linguist and culturologist. After studying German and Linguistics at the Moscow State University (MGU), she specialised in two domains: the history of Western literature on the one hand and comparative linguistics and Sanskrit (with V. Porzezinski and M. Pokrovskij) on the other. During her academic career, she worked for several institutions: the Institute of Language and Literature of the Russian Association of Research Institutes in Social Sciences (1922-1929), the Institute of the Peoples of the East [Institut narodov Vostoka] (1926-1929), the State Academy of the Artistic Science (1924-1930). She was also a member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle (since 1920), along with Gustav Špet and Roman Jakobson.

She is the author of numerous articles on linguistics, poetics, folklore, or literary studies, published mostly in encyclopedias of the time. Her interests extended to general linguistics, semasiology, experimental phonetics, socio-linguistics, Indo-european, Turkic and Caucasian linguistics, literary theory, Ancient and Modern Indian literature, European Medevial literature and German literature of the 18th and 19th Century.

She earned a reputation both as a propagandist of the ideas of Western European social linguistics and as a convinced follower of Nikolaj Marr's “Japhetology”, the official Marxist theory of language in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s. The main objective of her 1926 book, Language and Society, was to present to the Soviet public « the new accomplishments of Western European thought in the domain of the sociology of langage ». In the book, she discusses works by renown linguists such as Antoine Meillet, Edward Sapir, Otto Jespersen and Ferdinand de Saussure.

A selected bibliography of Šor, compiled originally by Sébastien Moret and Patrick Sériot is included at the end of the article in the references section.

3. Expression and Signification: The Logicist Trend in Modern Linguistics

«Steinthal and Lazarus Heyman Steinthal (1823-1899) and Moritz Lazarus (1824-1903), German psychologists and philosophers, founders of folk or comparative psychology (Völkerpsychologie), a Herbartian philosophy emphasising the importance of a historical, cultural, and social approach to the phenomenona of individual consciousness. retrieved Philosophy of the Language Sciences from its classification by the Greeks in logiké – one of the three branches of their system of Philosophy – and transferred it instead to Psychology. [...] Since then it has been fashionable to look down with considerable disdain upon Logical Grammar, notwithstanding its indubitable and numerous merits».Šor's (partial) translation adds a significant specification to two of the terms used by August Pott (1802-1887). They are indicated here in brackets in the full passage in original German : «Steinthal und Lazarus haben die Sprachphilosophie [filosofiju jazykovedenija, instead of filosofiju jazyka], welche von den Griechen unter ihren drei philosophischen Disziplinen in der logiké eingestellt, hergebrachter Weise bis auf sie herab, wenn schon nicht darin verblieb, doch in ihr vornehmlich alles Heil suchte, derselben entzogen und dafür der Psychologie überwiesen, um aus letzterer, zumal aus der Herbarts, neue Aufklärung und Begründung zu empfangen. Seitdem ist es Mode geworden, auf jene Art Grammatik [logičeskaja grammatika, instead of grammatika], welche sich freilich mit dem anmaßlichen und, es ist nicht zu leugnen, viel zu wenig gerechtfertigen Anspruch auf Allgemeinheit spreizt, und auf die Bemühungen um eben diese, besonders am Schlusse des vorigen und zu Anfange unseres Jahrhunderts eifrigst gepflegte Disziplin mit (oft ohne Kenntnis derselben) großer Mißachtung herabzusehen, trotz unleugbar vielfacher Verdienste». Pott 1974 [1884], 209. These lines were penned by the eighty-year old Pott, In Einleitung in die allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, 1884 (Techm.  Zt. I). one of the founders of scientific linguistics, at the start of the last quarter of the past century. By defending in this way the necessary tie that binds the theory of the language sciences with logic, Pott unconsciously extended a hand to the generation of linguists following him, just as his own celebrated scholarly career was nearing its end. Refusing to be satisfied, as the Neogrammairians had been before them, with their role as naïve empiricists, Suffice it here to recall how [a leading Neogrammarian linguist, Berthold] Delbrück resolved the dispute between Herbartians and Voluntarists in linguistics (Grundfragen der Sprachforschung, p. 41): «In practice», the positions of Wundt «provide the linguist approximately the same assistance as the positions of the previous theories». the new linguists were beginning to search for the scientific foundations of their discipline, its object, its methods and system. Concurrently to Pott's text, Anton MartyAnton Marty (1847-1914), Swiss-born philosopher, leader of the Brentano School in Prague and author of influential works in philosophy of langage, see in particular Marty 1908. had thus begun to publish articles in the Vierteljahrschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie e.g. Marty 1884-92; 1884-94. Edmund Husserl also published some of his first articles (e.g. Husserl 1891) in this journal edited by the empirio-criticist Richard Avenarius (1843-1896) and Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), the founder of experimental psychology. in which he sharply criticised Steinthal's «papal authority in linguistics» and reassessed precisely those fundamental problems that psychologistic grammar had decisively failed to resolve: general syntax and general semasiology.

In truth, and as far removed as he was from Steinthal's conceptualism, Marty nevertheless paid tribute to his time by insisting on the importance of psycho­logy as a foundational discipline for linguistics. Later scholars, however, took a step further towards logic, refusing to construct linguistics on the foundations of psychology and other empirical sciences. By «returning to the old idea of general grammar»,Unattributed quote [Simone Aurora suggests Šor might be referring to Husserl 1984 [1901], 302]. they highlighted its relation with the philosophical grammar of the 18th Century.

The path taken by contemporary logicist linguistics is of course substantively different from the path chosen by its forebearers and the grammaire raisonnée of the 17th and 18th Centuries. The latter considered logical relations as givens, upon which a normative system of linguistic significations was then built. The former, by contrast, comes to the discovery of a logical moment in the word by means of linguistic inquiries and of an analysis of the structure of the word.

Linguistic inquiries are undeniably part of the philosophical presuppositions necessary to build a logic. Only with their help, indeed, does it become possible to distinctly and clearly separate, first, the specific objects of logical investigation and, further, the essential aspects and differences of these objects.

Naturally, grammatical inquiries should not be understood here in the sense of an empirical investigation of the structure of a given, historically attested language. The term refers rather to the general studies that can define the fundamental concepts of linguistics and that form the necessary precondition for concrete linguistic observations.

In any case, whether there is an essential, necessary link between thought and language or not, it is beyond doubt that judgements, in particular those related to the higher intellectual sphere, cannot be realised outside of linguistic expression.

As such, it is clear that the objects studied by logic are initially given in a grammatical form. To be more precise, these objects are given as if embedded in concrete mental experiences which – in their function as meaning intentions (Bedeutungsintention) or meaning realisations (Bedeutungserfüllung) – are them­selves inside the linguistic expression and form a certain unity with it.

It is from these complex unities that the logician abstracts the components that interest him. But while focussing his attention on the experiences that are tied to the “actual expression” and serve the functions of Bedeutungsintention and Bedeutungserfüllung, he cannot completely leave aside the verbal-sensual (sprachlich-sinnlich) aspect of these components (i.e. the aspect that actually constitutes the expression itself). Rather, he must also analyse the unified or unitary character of the sensual aspects of an expression and its signification.

The history of logic shows how often and subtly the analysis of signification has fallen under the influence of grammatical analysis. For a scholar, the errors induced by the substitution of the specific analysis of significations with a purely grammatical analysis are amongst the most revealing. For example, when we direct our simple, initial reflections upon our own thought and its linguistic expression (as we often do, without philosophical preparation, for the purposes of practical thought), we are easily led to establish a parallelism between thought and speech. Everyone knows that words possess certain significations and that, usually, different words express distinct significations. As such, if it were possible to regard the correspondence between words and significations as a given, absolute a priori, and if, in particular, the fundamental categories of significations were indeed complete reflections of grammatical categories, then the phenomenology of linguistic forms could indeed include a phenomenology of significations (Bedeutungserlebnisse) and the analysis of significations would concord fully with grammatical analysis.

It is hardly necessary to show that such a parallelism does not actually exist. As a result, grammatical analysis cannot limit itself to distinguishing expres­sions simply as sensual, external phenomena; on the contrary, it is defined in principle by the necessity to also take differences of significations into account. Grammatically relevant significations, moreover, are sometimes essential, sometimes contingent – depending on whether the practical goals of speech require particular forms of expression to differentiate significations in an essential or a contingent (i.e. only in verbal communication) way.

Differences of signification are not alone in inducing differentiation of expressions. Changes in emotional coloration, the facts of social dialectology or the aesthetic tendencies of speech all create a multitude of essentially unique expressions.

The merely partial correspondence between differences in language and differences in thought and, in particular, between the forms of words and ideas leads us naturally to look for a logical difference behind each clear, gram­matically expressed difference; from this natural tendency arises an essential necessity, as much for the logician as for the linguist, to subject the relation between expression and signification to an exhaustive analysis.

It is not sufficient here to grasp the difference between grammatical and logical differentiation in general terms – even with the help of appropriate materials. On the contrary, we can be led to unwanted extremes by the general affirmation that grammatical differences do not always correspond to logical ones or, in other words, that languages and their forms give expression not only to fundamental logical differences but also to practically useful material differences of significations (e.g. for communicative purposes). Examples of such extremes are the excessive narrowing of the domain of logical forms, the exclusion of series of logically significant differences as strictly grammatical, or their reduction to the small number of differences used by traditional syllogistics (Brentano, Marty).

For this reason, the construction of a scientific logic necessarily requires a full explanation of the relations between grammatical analysis and the analysis of significations. This is only possible by means of a precise definition of the relations between expression, signification, meaning-intention (Bedeutungs­intention) and meaning-realisation (Bedeutungserfüllung).

The common definition of the word as a “sign of thought” is somewhat equivocal. In this case, “sign” (Zeichen) is used in the sense of “expression” (Ausdruck). But these terms do not in fact correspond with each other.

Every sign is the sign of something, but not every sign possesses a “signi­fication” (Bedeutung), a “meaning” (Sinn), that is “expressed” (wird ausgedrückt) by that sign. In many cases, it is not even possible to say that a sign “de­signates” (bezeichnet) that which it is said to be the sign of. Only in the case of arbitrary signs created with a specific intention is it appropriate to talk of “designation” (Bezeichnen). But even when one can speak of “designation” it is not always possible to speak of the type of “signification” (Bedeuten) that characterizes “expression”. Indeed, signs in the sense of “indications” (Anzeichen) (such as tokens, marks, features, etc.) do not “express” anything, they only appear as characteristic features meant to designate the object to which they are inherent. Thus, crying is an indication of pain, of suffering. In the same way, one can include in the concept of indication the type of signs that are deprived of the special characteristic of “designation”, i.e. that are not “marks”, “features” (Merkmale). Thus, one can say that smoke rising at the end of a field constitues an indication of a house.

These two types of indications are united by the following, common trait: in indications, known objects or relations that we already know to exist point to or serve as the token (zeigen an) of the existence of other known objects or relations in such a way that our belief in the existence of the ones is experienced as a motive {but not as a cause (als ein nichteinsichtiges Motiv)} for our belief in or assumption of the existence of the others. Clearly, the meaning of an indication derives precisely from the fact that some known object is assumed to exist because another known object is given.

That being said, it is absolutely not necessary to understand this tie between objects in the sense of a “proof” (Beweis). A token “points to” (weist hin), but does not “prove”. Indeed, when the existence of a state-of-affairs serves as univocal proof (erschliesst einsichtig) of the existence of the other, we do not call the first a token or a sign of the second but speak of a logical proof that involves an objective relation of cause and effect behind the subjective inference or argument. What we have here is a logical rule that goes beyond the spatial and temporal limits linked with a motivated judgement.

By contrast, when we say that a certain A is an indication of a certain B, we assume that the existence of A “points to” the existence of B, we are even completely convinced of the existence of that B. However, we absolutely do not assume the existence of an objectively necessary tie between A and B. Our judgements are tied not as logically grounded premises and conclusions, but as beliefs, as mental experiences based on our previous experience.

As such, the mental facts in which the concept of “indication” is rooted belong to the vast group of facts referred to by the historical term “association of ideas”. Indeed: the very essence of association is that it does not only activate “anew” the facts connected associatively with each other or “call them to consciousness”, but that it creates a new unity whose objectively necessary foundation is absent in the experienced facts themselves. When A calls B to consciousness, then not only are A and B experienced simultaneously, but a clearly felt consciousness of the tie between the two also arises: A points to B, B inheres to (gehörig) A. Togetherness (zusammengehörig) results from the simple co-existence, and that is precisely the function of association. It is clear that tokens (Anzeige)Our translation reflects here the Russian “primeta” (omen, token, sign, clue), rather than the German “Anzeige” added in parenthesis by Šor. also belong to the domain of phenomena where one object points to another, not only reminding us of it, but bearing witness to it, inducing the assumption of its existence – or where the objective tie itself is perceived precisely as has just been described.

It is consequently necessary to distinguish the sign in its proper sense, the signifying sign (bedeutsames Zeichen) or the expression (Ausdruck), from the indication (Anzeichen) and the sign-token (anzeigendes Zeichen). But the term “expression” can itself lead to confusion. Indeed, we often understand under the term “expression” phenomena that accompany our sign-words in­voluntarily and without any communicative aims, such as mimics or gestures. True, these phenomena – even when they are not accompanied by any word – can provide an indication of the state of mind of the speaker to the listener. But these phenomena do not constitute the essence of “expression” as sign-words do since they do not form in consciousness a unity of what expresses and what is expressed. The speaker does not communicate anything with them; focus or intention (Intention) are absent from their manifestation, they do not express any “thought”, whether for the speaker or for others. In one word, these “expressions” are bereft of “signification”. To be sure, such involuntary manifestations can be interpreted by the perceiver, they can provide him indications as to the experiences of the speaker, but they “signify” only insofar as they motivate his subsequent judgements, i.e. insofar as they constitute “indications”.

Having thus eliminated the possibility of equivocation, we turn now to the analysis of expression in its proper sense. Usually, two funda­mental moments are distinguished in the structure of expression:

1) the physical aspect of expression (a complex of sensual data forming a perceived sign such as a complex of articulated sounds, the visible form of an inscription, etc.)

2) the known mental experiences that are linked associatively with the expression; these are what make the sensual sign into an expression. Usually these mental experiences are called the “meaning” (Sinn) or “signification” (Bedeutung) of the expression.

The analysis of the structure of the word might herewith appear to be complete; but more precise inquiries show that a simple distinction between the physical and mental aspects of the word-sign is by far insufficient and does not cover all its manifestations.

This can be made clear by considering expression in its communicative function. In short, a complex of articulated sounds (or the visible form of an inscription etc.) only becomes communicative speech when the speaker produces that complex with the intention “of speaking about something”, in other words, when the speaker, through the use of known mental acts, endows the complex of articulated sounds with a meaning he wants to impart or communicate to a listener. Effective communication, in turn, is only possible thanks to the fact that the listener understands the intention (Intention) of the speaker. The listener achieves this by perceiving the speaker as a person who isn't simply producing sounds, but who speaks, i.e. who by articulating sounds performs acts that “give meaning” to these sounds and who wants to express and communicate this meaning to the listener. Speech becomes speech on the one hand and linguistic communication is made possible on the other hand precisely through the correlation – obtained through the physical aspect of speech – of congruent physical and mental experiences in the persons commu­nicating in conversation. The acts of talking and listening, the expression (Kundgabe) of mental experiences in the act of talking and their perception (Kundnahme) in the act of listening are all correlated with each other.

It is therefore clear that in communicative speech, each expression and each sign also carries out the function of indication (Anzeichen). A word appears simultaneously to the listener as a sign of the “thought” of the speaker, i.e. a sign of its meaning-giving (sinnverleihend) mental experiences, and an indication of all the other mental experiences partaking in the communicative intention. This second function of the word-expression may be called its expressive (kundgebend) function. Communication itself – the mental acts that give meaning to the sign – is as if embedded in that expression.

It follows from this that the concept of “indication” (Anzeichen) is broader than the concept of sign (Zeichen). However, this does in no way lead to the conclusion that the first concept stands in generic relation to the second. There is a qualitative difference between the two: signification (Bedeuten) is not a token (Anzeige) although, as shown above, they unite in communicative speech and in conversation.

Things are different in solitary thought: here expression keeps its function as a sign, but stops fulfilling its function as an indication.

In solitary thought, expression retains everything that characterises it as an expression. Not only does it possess a signification as before, but that signifi­cation itself is precisely the same as in communicative speech. Only in one case does a word stop being a word: when all attention is concentrated exclusively on the sensual aspect of the word, on the word as a sound. When we understand a word, it expresses exactly the same thing, indifferently whether it is addressed to someone else or to oneself.

In solitary thought, however, the word does lose its second function – the function of indication. Indeed, an indication is always perceived as something that physically exists. In the particular case of solitary thought, the word has no sensual dimension. What is more, this physical absence of the word neither disturbs nor interests us in the least, because the expression continues to function as an expression, independently of the word. True, the expression also “points to” its signification; it is as if it deflects the attention from itself and directs it towards its own meaning, its signification. But this act is qualitatively distinct from the denotation provided by a token. Here the existence of the sign does not motivate the existence of its signification, or to be more precise, our belief in the existence of its signification.

As such, by allowing us to isolate more precisely the concepts of “sign” and “indication”, the analysis of the word-sign in conversation and in solitary thought also establishes two fundamental moments in the structure of the word: the moment of “indicating”Šor contrasts the neologism “priznačimost'” with “značimost'” (significance), playing on the parallelism between the words “znak“(sign) and “priznak“ (indication). or expression (Kundgabe) and the moment of “significance” or signification (Bedeutung). It is essential therefore to differentiate in each expression (Ausdruck) between what it “expresses” (kundgibt) and what it “signifies” (bedeutet).

Let us digress now from the experiences that relate specifically to expression and concentrate our attention on the distinctions that are inherent to ex­pression independently of its functioning in conversation or in solitary thought. At first glance, only one distinction seems possible: the distinction between the expression itself and what it expresses as its signification, as its meaning. In reality, however, a number of various relations are intertwined here, so that it is in fact possible to understand different things under the terms “signification” and “what is expressed”. From the perspective of a pure description, the phenomenon of a meaningful expression can be analysed: firstly, into the physical phenomenon, through which the expression consti­tutes itself physically; secondly, into the acts that lend signification – or in some cases “intuitibility” (anschauliche Fülle)Intuitibility renders here the Russian word “nagljadnost'” employed by Šor, rather than the German term she indicates in parenthesis. – to it, and through which its relation to an expressed object (Beziehung auf die ausgedrückte Gegenständlichkeit) is con­stituted. It is precisely thanks to these last acts that expression is something more than a simple sound. Expression implies something, and because of its implication of that something, it is object-related. Every expression not only enunciates something, but it enunciates it about something; it possesses not only a signification, but it also relates to a given object. That object can be given in different ways: 1) it can be factually present, thanks to accompanying perceptions, or 2) in the absence of a presentified object of perception, it is included only in the intended signification.

Let us consider in more detail the first case, in which the relation to the object is realised by accompanying perceptions. Does the signification correspond here with the object? Evidently, it does not.

It is easy to convince oneself of the necessity to distinguish signification, (the content of an expression) and object by juxtaposing examples in which several expressions that possess the same signification denote different objects (“horse”, “table” and generally all universals) or where expressions imply one and the same object while possessing different significations (“the Victor of Jena”, “the Vanquished of Waterloo”). Obviously, this does not exclude the possibility of expressions that do not correspond in either case (homonyms), or that correspond in both, such as tautological expressions (London, Лондон).

The example of the expression “horse” applies to all universals, i.e. to all names that possess a content. The case is different with proper names. Proper names are by essence polysemous; precisely because they can have many significations, they can designate many things. Where a word has only one meaning, it points to only one object. In this sense, one needs to separate polysemous (equivocal) names from names with multiple contents.

The complexity of these relations is further reinforced by the fact that next to “objective” expressions (i.e. expressions whose signification is related only to their sound-shape and is understood immediately, without recalling all the circumstances of a conversation or referring to its actors) we also find essen­tially occasional expressions, i.e. expressions to which a whole group of possible, conceptually united (begrifflich einheitlich) significations is inherent, and whose precise, actual signification must thus be defined every time in reference to the given circumstances, the speaker, etc. Personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, etc. are examples of this last category. Indubitably, the word “I” possesses a general signifying function: to denotate the current speaker. But the general idea with which we express this function is not the same idea that then constitutes its immediate and specific signification. In communicative speech, the word “I” functions as a “token” (Anzeige) of the representation of “I” assumed by the speaker. This token makes it possible to understand the signification of “I”, i.e. to perceive the person that is present to the listener in immediate perception as the object of the message; but the word “I” itself is not capable of producing a corresponding representation in the absence of an objective expression, for example the word “horse”. In words of the type “I”, so to say, one signification is therefore built upon the other; the first signification, the general function of the word, is linked with the word in such a way as to carry out the function of denotation in the actual repre­sentation; the token itself points to the second signification of the word, which is occasional and in any case distinct.

These remarks on essentially occasional (wesentlich okkasionell) expressions bring an important correction to the distinction between usual (usuell) and occasional (okkasionäll) significations of words such as one finds it, for example, in Paul.Hermann Paul (1846-1921), Neogrammarian linguist sometimes considered as a proto-structuralist. Essentially occasional expressions are tied not accidentally but usu­ally with their corresponding expressions; the latter are usually (usuell) polysemous.

The distinction between essentially occasional and objective expressions intersects with further possible distinctions establishing other forms of poly­semy such as, for example, the distinction between complete and incomplete, or unclear and exact expressions But whatever the form of polysemy, one thing remains essential: distinguishable oscillations in signification concern only the realisation of significations in subjective acts, in the concrete acts of reference to an object in which significations function as such.

In itself, the signification of an occasional, contextually-oriented expression is as united as the signification of an objective expression and doesn't give rise to any hesitations.

Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish two further moments in what we are used to call the “signification” of a word: the signification of the expression in its proper sense and its function as a name related to a given object, i.e. its objective relation (gegenständliche Beziehung).

This distinction leads us back to the above-mentioned possibility that an expression can retain its signification despite being deprived of a founding, presented object of perception; the relation of the expression to the object is realised only through the intention of signification.

These are the fundamental distinctions established by logical grammar in that subtle complex which the linguists of the last century have tended to designate under the single term of “signification of the word”. It is hardly necessary to insist on the importance of these distinctions for the development of one of the most significant branches of linguistics, general semasiology.

Indeed, «in its history, empirical linguistics has too often got tangled up in the question of the difference between meaning, representation and thing. To this day, what is usually presented as a “history of significations” is in significant part a history of the things themselves, of the changes in the way they were used, of changes in everyday life in general. It is not a “history” of the meaning of words».Unattributed quote. Wundt, for example, associates facts of “assimilative transformations” (assimilative Bedeutungswandel) such as the transfer of the name “Korn” – which was closely associated with the transformation of the technique of minting – to the domain of the regular transformation of signifi­cations (regulärer Bedeutungswandel).

Similarly, references to the “wealth” or the “poverty” of a given language are relatively frequent and are usually motivated by mentions of the presence or absence of a given group of words. But in fact it is absolutely clear that the question here concerns the transformation of everyday life itself, not the enrichment or depletion of language. One also finds this error in solid recent works in semasiology: in his research on Old Scandinavian, for example, M. CahenM. Cahen. Etudes sur le vocabulaire religieux du vieux Scandinave, 1921. treats the substantial replacement of the pagan ceremony of marriage with its Christian variant only as a change of signification of the ritual terms themselves.

One can point to a further case where a “history of things” is taken for a “history of significations”: the well-known examples of the tropes “feather”, “bed”, or “town” that figure in popular anthologies such as “Leben der Wörter” and “Vie des mots” [Life of Words]. It is clear that such books speak not of changes in the signification of these words (they are in fact only secondary and arbitrary), but of the techniques of production and the transformation of the things themselves.

The nature of such “name transfers” resides in the fact that the function carried out by the word here is not a semasiological, meaning-giving one: the word carries out only a nominative, referential function; it refers to, it names a thing. Put in another way, the word is not the sign of a meaning with which it is tied in an act of thought, but a sensually given thing that is “associatively” connected with another sensually perceived thing.

The following conclusion is thus of essential importance to linguistics: the study of word-names must not be confused with the study of word-significations. Because a name is tied with the thing it designates only by way of “association”, a name transfer usually happens through a multiplicity of associations that it is not possible to reconstruct without a precise historical knowledge of the conditions of that name's actual transfer.

Indeed, the phenomena that are connected to nomination or to the use of names in transposed signification – and that are grouped by Wundt under the heading of “singular signification change” (singulärer Bedeutungswandel)Cf. «Der singuläre Bedeutungswandel umfasst [...] alle diejenigen Erscheinungen des Wechsels der Wortbedeutungen, die aus individuellen, an spezielle Raum – und Zeit bedingungen – gebundenen Motiven hervorgehen. Auf den ersten Blick erscheint er daher oft als ein launenhafter, unter keine allgemeine Gesetzmässigkeit zu ordnender Vorgang. Wenn wir uns aber die besonderen Bedingungen vergegenwärtigen, unter denen er erfolgt ist, so erweist sich dieser Vorgang in der Regel gerade so gut motiviert wie irgend eine Erscheinung des regulären Bedeutungswandels; und als der einzige Unterschied bleibt der zurück, dass die Ursachen, die ihn bestimmten, einem in dieser Kombination nur einmal vorhanden gewesenen Zusammenhang von Bedingungen ihren Ursprung verdanken». [unattributed quote] – are of an absolutely different order than the phenomena he defines as “regular signification change” (regulärer Bedeutungswandel). All the features mentioned by Wundt indicate that we are dealing here with historico-cultural facts in a strict sense. Such facts can be explained only with a precise knowledge of the historico-cultural conditions of the transfer or creation of a name.

The theoretical principle behind this distinction reveals itself in the distinction established by logical grammar between the “signification of the word” and its “objective relation”.

No less essential is the distinction between “intended signification” and “realised signification”. In contemporary linguistics, indeed, one has continued the practice inherited from the last century of studying representation as if it were the fundamental signification of the word. But is that really the case? Let's take the simple case of a communication between a speaker and a listener. Let's assume that the speaker names a given thing. When hearing from the mouth of the speaker the word that we perceive as a sign of the thing, we certainly do not always turn towards that thing. Moreover, that thing itself, for the most part, is not present, and possibly it doesn't even exist in reality. Nonetheless, real comprehension does indeed happen.

How is comprehension possible here? Traditional linguistics, following Steinthal, holds that the perception of the sound-shape of a word triggers by association the same representation in the listener than the one held by the speaker. The speaker, therefore, refers not to things, but to his representations of things.

A detailed analysis of the acts of consciousness that are tied with the act of speech, however, shows that the representations that arise in a speaker and a listener do not enter at all in the object of communication and that, in the most extreme cases, they are connected with it only as loosely as an illustration is to a book. The huge amount of collected materials on the psychology of speech,Betts. The distribution... of mental imagery, 1909. Binet. Etude expérimentale sur l'intelligence, 1903. along with the new light cast on this question by the investigations of van GinnekenJac. van Ginneken (1877-1945), Dutch linguist, author of Principes de linguistique psychologique (1907). clearly demonstrate both the extraordinary arbitrariness and diversity of images and representations that accompany verbal communication on the one hand, and the possibility of reducing these images and repre­sentations to zero (représentations potentielles, Bedeutungsdispositionen) on the other hand. As such, the presence or absence of representations for the speaker in no way prevents him from knowing the signification of a word or from using it correctly, just as the presence or absence of corresponding repre­sentations for the listener in no way prevents him from understanding that signification.

«When listening to a speaker talk, as long as a listener doesn't stop or doesn't want to stop taking an interest in the meaning of what the speaker is saying, any “representations“ that arise in the speaker while he speaks will remain completely unrelated to the meaning understood by the listener.

In this sense, if there is no direct reference to an object that can lead us to a representation that approximates the one held by the speaker, we cannot ever know neither what thing exactly the speaker is designating, nor what repre­sentation of that thing he has. The speaker himself, when designating a thing, especially if he uses not only proper names but also common ones, names the thing only indeterminately, i.e. he relates – and forces us to relate – the naming act to a whole series, group, or manifold of things, so that from the point of view of knowledge and understanding it is indifferent what thing is repre­sented, whether to him or to us».Unattributed quote.

It is true that since the times of Steinthal contemporary linguistics has resorted to the study of symbolic thought. «The representations of the sound aspect of a word», according to this theory, «appear to us as symbols, as signs of our own thought, in place of representations of such objects of thought that belong to the category of mental phenomena that can be produced only with difficulty or not at all».Unattributed quote. But here as well, observations have shown that in real thought attention is not directed at all on the sensual aspect of signs.

Just as with chess, what is essential is not the form, the aspect, the material of each figure but only the game rules which give them their specific signification in the game. The particularity of the act of understanding reveals itself especially clearly when it is compared with the act of recognition, in which attention is indeed directed towards the sensual aspect of the sign. Thus, it is possible for us to recognise Latin or Greek words which we learned but whose signification we have already forgotten; these words present themselves as known to us, but are nonetheless incomprehensible. Through this comparison with the characteristic feature of familiarity, we discover the characteristic feature of understanding, whose inclusion essentially transforms the content of expression without however transforming its sensual aspect.

In short, individual, unreliable representations clearly do not function as the general binding link of understanding, they are not the reason for the fact that a speaker designating a thing and a listener perceiving a word-name will understand the same thing under that word.

What serves then as this binding link? That link is the social moment in language, which is itself revealed in that instant when a word functions as a sign.

Indeed, amongst the distinctions established above, it suffices here to recall the function of the word as an indication of the mental set of the speaker and the function of the word as the sign of a given objective sense, communicated to the listener by the speaker.

In the first case, the “understanding” of a word is not different in any way from the “understanding” of any other gesture or sound, voluntarily or arbitrarily made by a human being or an animal. The perceiver “understands” it, or rather interprets it as the indication or the symptom of a well-known psychological condition of the speaker not because that gesture signifies something but because, whilst perceiving, he sympathetically accompanied it and reproduced the whole complex of psycho-physiological acts that came with it. The psychological experience of the individual served here as the foundation of “understanding”; the word was performed as the expression of an individual experience, as a natural cry.

The situation is different when the word functions as the sign of a known meaning communicated to a listener by a speaker, i.e. when a speaker and a listener are talking with each other. In the first case the listener might not know the language of the speaker and yet still be able to deduce the latter's experiences from his mimics, gestures, tone, etc. In the second case, it is essential that the listener perceive the «word as anindication of the presence of the culture of the speaker and of his belonging to a given circle of human culture and human community linked in the unity of language, in order to recognise that word; that is to say, he must recognise his own and the speaker's belonging to a single linguistic – and thus also a cultural, communal – collective in order to understand the word, i.e. to place it in a known and comprehensible context».Špet, p.1 [original quotation is incomplete ; cf. Špet 1923]

In other words, understanding is possible only on one condition, namely that both speaker and listener be members of the one and same culturo-linguistic entity. Indeed, the connection of the sign (the sound-complex) with meaning is not created or recreated by individuals. Otherwise understanding would not be possible.

The connection of the sign with meaning is derived by the individual from the collective of which he becomes a member thanks to the establishing of a tie of mutual understanding between him and the other members of that same collective. This tie, as such, is objective, it is provided from the outside to the individual; it forces him to chose precisely these and not other sound-complexes in order to express precisely these and not other significations. This tie is determined not by the personal psychological experiences of the indi­vidual but the tradition of the collective. The specific function of the word-sign resides precisely in this objective, supra-individual character of the tie between sign and signification.

Having further explained the above-mentioned distinction between word-sign and word-token by identifying and abstracting a social moment in language, logical grammar thus establishes a distinction between the word-sign as a fact of the socio-cultural world and the word-cry as a phenomenon of nature, all while eliminating a number of the essential equivocations in which empirical linguistics had erred.

The old definition of the word saw it as the representation of a sound complex linked by means of association with the representation of a given object or phenomenon: by thus casting aside the essential moment in the word – its communicative character, its supra-individual significance–, this definition led – after the elimination by the Neogrammarians of such metaphysical ideas as “national spirit”, “language organism”, etc. – straight to the proclamation of the psychological and psycho-physiological processes that occur in the indi­vidual act of speech as the unique object of linguistics. That same definition erased the border between linguistics and the other disciplines investigating its object, and it was suggested that our discipline play but the modest role of ancillae psychologiae. Many recent works in psychological linguistics (van Ginneken) or linguistic psychology (Thumb)Albert Thumb (1865-1915), a student of Hermann Paul, also close to the Würzburg school of the psychologist Oswald Külpe. still bear this character.

By contrast, the above-mentioned distinction allows us to instate a strict border between the science of the word-sign and the sciences of the word as a natural phenomenon, in which it is appropriate to include both psychology as the study of the word “as the sign of a specific psychological state” of the speaker, and anthropology as the study of the word “as a common trait of Man”. In fact, the psycho-physiological processes tied to the act of speech are not what characterises language. These processes can also be identified in meaningless cries and similar phenomena to which we do not apply the term “language”. The specific difference between meaningful speech and a mean­ingless cry resides rather in the fact that, in speech, processes are oriented towards the realisation of a given social goal, towards the creation of a verbal sign meant to exist within the limits of a given linguistic community as the bearer of a known meaning.

The fact that the significance of a word is a supra-individual phenomenon that exists in a community is what provides the scientific foundation to the social theory of language towards which contemporary linguistics is slowly advancing.Such a position also provides a scientific basis to the linguistic system of Saussure, which – despite being correct in itself – is in fact derived from obviously erroneous premises, namely the affirmation – which was so essential to empirical linguistics in particular – of language as a system (a two-dimensional construction).

The specific significance of the word as a socio-cultural fact requires for itself the creation of a specific science with a specific method that is essentially different from the methods of the natural sciences applied to the study of the word as a phenomenon of nature.

The essence of this method is conditioned by the particular way in which a listener can recognise a word-sign, namely by placing it in a given meaningful, nominative context that is known to and understood by him.

In other words, this is the method of interpretation, which can reveal behind each expression the signification or the meaning of which that expression is the sign. Insofar as a word, as an object of linguistics, is always a phenomenon of culture, the method of interpretation (placing words in their corresponding context) is always historical. Just as any other thing, a word cannot be properly understood if it is wrenched from its historico-cultural environment. A piece of stone with a hole or the fragment of a clay vessel of any given shape found during excavations do not signify anything on their own. But to a scholar they already mean a lot as the indicators of a given stage of cultural development, or in other words, as a part of a definite nexus of things. They can tell even more if they are mentioned in ancient legends or if their depiction is found in ancient frescos. The same holds for a word: in themselves, the names of places and people that have been accidentally conserved or mutilated by tradition speak no more to the researcher than a solitary crock or a stone chip found no one knows where. But if analysis can reveal that these words belong to a still existing group of languages, it can categorise them in a given linguistic system and allow us to judge of the level of archaism of the language type they represent. Such language fragments can tell us even more if the results of their linguistic analysis correspond with the data of other sciences such as arche­ological findings or studies in art history.

The necessity of historical linguistics alongside theoretical linguistics is thus established. Obviously, a history of language that involves placing observed linguistic facts in the general context of their time does not have anything in common with the study of the changes of separate sounds over time (Saussure's diachronic linguistics), with their causal explanation or with the determination of laws regulating these changes in the spirit of the natural sciences, a quest with which the entire theoretical linguistics of the past quarter of a century was obsessed. Similarly, such a history of language has as little in common with the study of the psycho-physiological laws that condition indi­vidual linguistic activity and its transformations than with Medieval specula­tions on the origin of language.

In reality, the link of the sign wih meaning is not created again and again by the individual, but is transferred to him by the collective of which he becomes a member thanks to the relations of mutual comprehension that are established between him and other members. Precisely this specific significance of the word as a socio-cultural fact prohibits us from relating it in any way to the word as a phenomenon of nature and, for the same reason, excludes a genetic approach from the point of view of individual experiences. For linguistics, the word starts to exist only when it is a message, a tool of communication, a culturo-historical fact. That which lies beyond these limits is simply not subject to the consideration of our discipline.

That being said, the correct interpretation of a word-sign of a given culture requires a preparatory, comprehensive description of the full complexity of its elements. This stage of historical linguistics is that which Saussure defines under the term of synchronic linguistics. Considering the current state of linguistics, this stage will of course take up all the strengths of scholars for a long time before they can turn to the historical interpretation of words.

In this sense, the static exploration of language (in contrast to the preceding genetic or “energetic” approaches) constitutes, together with interpretation, the second characteristic method of linguistics as a science of the word-sign.

But the function of the word as a sign is its fundamental, usual function. The logical analysis of the word thus brings the scholar to assert its social character: the word (in its fundamental function as a sign of meaning) is a fact, a thing of the culturo-historical world, transferred through tradition by a given collective to a particular member and possessing an objective being independently of each member of the linguistic community.