Searching for the essence of language

R. Jakobson, E. Coseriu et F. de Saussure

Abstract

The aim of this article is to compare Roman Jacobson's and Eugène Coseriu's conceptions of the essence of language with those of Ferdinand de Saussure. Although we can now see that Saussure often used the term essence in his lectures at the University of Geneva, for example, in the third year of his lectures (1910-1911) when he said that '[t]he association of an idea with a sign is what constitutes the essence of language'. For example, the discovery of the Cours de grammaire gothique, which Saussure taught for two years (1881-1882) at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, revealed that he had taken whole pages out of his Paris lectures, put them in envelopes and then transported them to Geneva. As for the approaches of Roman Jacobson and Eugène Coseriu - semiotic and diachronic in the case of the former, philosophical and ontological in the case of the latter - we shall see that they are not similar to those of Saussure. For Saussure, the search for the essence of language was inseparable from the project of creating a new epistemologically grounded linguistic discipline.