Roman Jakobson and the history of Saussurean concepts in North American Linguistics

Abstract

SummaryLeonard Bloomfield was the major force in the initial dissemination of Saussurean concepts in North America (Joseph 1989a, Koerner 1989), but his role was limited to his middle years from 1922 to 1933, and for some time thereafter American linguists paid little attention to Saussure’sCours. In fact, studies on Saussure tend to move directly from Bloomfield to Noam Chomsky (e.g., Gadet 1989, Joseph 1990), with little discussion of the intervening quarter century in American linguistics. However, when Roman Jakobson arrived in New York in 1941, he brought with him a long record of commentary and criticism on Saussure’s ideas, and through his American teaching and publications, Jakobson became the next major source of attention to Saussure’s work. In this paper, I examine Jakobson’s complex positions on Saussure, with special attention to his first two decades in the United States. I then briefly consider Jakobson’s role in a third period of Saussurean concepts in the history of American linguistics, a period of revived interest that began in the late 1950s, engaging linguists from a diversity of theories and coinciding in the next decade with the republication of Jakobson’s European writings and with the rise of North American interest in the history of linguistics.