Language Scierrce.% Volume 15. Number I. pp. I-14. 1993 Printed in Great Britain

0388-ooO1193 $6.00+.00 0 1993 Pergamon Press Ltd

SAUSSURE AND LINGUISTIC GEOGRAPHY

ROY HARRIS

Saussure’s views on linguistic geography are not-as the position of the chapter entitled ‘Linguistique gkographique’ in the COWS de linguisrique g&~Prale might appear to suggest-a mere appendage to his proposals for the science of linguistics. On the contrary, they constitute an important part of Saussure’s argument and must be seen in the context of the debate about the work of GilEron in the early decades of the 20th century.

It is interesting to ask why, during the critical reaction in the years which followed the publication of Saussure’s COWS de Zinguistique g&?rule in 1916, linguists almost unanimously underestimated, indeed virtually ignored, the significance of Part IV, devoted to Linguistique Gkogruphique. Bloomfield, for instance, in his famous review of 1923, does not even mention, let alone comment on, Saussure’s position on dialects. That neglect continues today.

One possible reason that immediately comes to mind is that, according to Saussure’s own account, geographic variation in language belongs to ‘external linguistics’; and Saussure’s major contribution to his discipline was seen to lie in the sphere of internal linguistics. {Although Saussure had at one time done fieldwork, he never published the results and he was not by professional training a dialectoIogist.) If that was the reasoning behind the neglect of Part IV of the COWS, it is bad reasoning; not only because what is said in Part IV about the mechanism of dialectal divergence is both interesting and original, but also because, as I shall try to show, Saussure’s relegation of linguistic geography to external linguistics is in fact a vital part of his case for identifying la lungue as the essential object of study which defines linguistics as an independent academic discipline.

Perhaps the next question to ask is what exactly Saussure’s concept of a dialect was. It can be argued (Harris 1990) that in the European linguistic tradition there have only ever been three basic concepts of what a dialect is. These may be called the ‘con- tinuum’ concept, the ‘relational’ concept and the ‘aggregate’ concept.

The oldest of these is the ‘continuum’ concept, which we already find in Greek writings about language. According to this concept it is simply a fact of social life that different communities tend to give different names to things, and to discover this is no more surprising than to discover that different communities tend to have different customs and practices in other areas of social behaviour; in fact, not surprising at all if you believe that what things are called is quite arbitrary anyway, for then there is

Address correspondence to: Professor Roy Harris, 2 Paddox Close, Summertown, Oxford OX2 7LR, U.K.

? ROII’ HARRIS

no good reason for supposing that speech would be the same between different communities in the first place.

Given any feature of linguistic usage you care to take, there will be (and can be) only three logical possibilities on which to map the relationship between community A and community B, and they can be set out in a simple table.

A B

X 3

x’ X" X Y

In other words, the first possibility is that the usage in the two communities is identical; the second possibility is that the two communities have very similar but not identical usages; and the third possibility is that the usages are quite different. The third possibility covers also the case where one of the two communities simply does not have the relevant usage at all. Obviously, this model leaves a great deal of room for argument about criteria of identity and difference; but that is going to be true of any model.

Now a corollary of this continuum model is that in principle there is no distinction to be drawn between languages and dialects, other than that the differences between two languages will be cumulatively greater and the differences between two dialects will be cumulatively less. But the differences themselves will be of the same kind- differences of pronunciation, of vocabulary, of syntax, and so on: it is just a matter of there being more of them or less of them between any two given communities. Hence the term continuum. The basic assumption is that linguistic variation is a con- tinuum which can be measured quantitatively in terms of the number of features or items which separate two or more communities. In itself, however, the continuum concept does not provide a clear definition of the term dialect. In theory, one can envisage a series of linguistic communities ranged along this continuum, each differing from its immediate neighbours by just one linguistic feature. The model itself does not tell us how few or how many linguistic differences separate dialects, or whether some differences are more important than others.

This continuum concept, which originates with the Greeks, seems to correspond very much to lay linguistic assumptions which are still widely held today by many people. For example, it underlies the lay belief that the reason why British people and French people have far greater difficulties in communicating with one another than British with Americans is simply a function of the fact that British speech and French speech have far fewer linguistic features in common than British speech and American speech. Nevertheless, the fact that from a British point of view Americans call tomatoes [tomeitozl is on a par with the fact that the French call them Itomatl. The difference is not one of kind but only of degree; that is, of relative positions on a continuum of differentiation.

SAUSSURE AND LlNGUISTIC GEOGRAPHY 3

It must be stressed that this is not a matter of whether people happen to have been educated to call certain forms of speech ‘languages’ and other forms of speech ‘dialects’. That is a separate question: it is a matter of metalinguistic terminology, which certainly complicates the issue, but is ultimately an irrelevance. What is in question here is whether there are any experiential criteria by which members of the lay public distinguish consistently between the speech forms of adjacent dialects and the speech forms of adjacent languages, in such a way as to yield, for example, the judgment that [tomeitol is a dialect variant of [tomato], whereas ftomatl is not a dialect variant of either in spite of its resemblance to both; or that the pronouns yours and youm belong to different dialects, but not to different languages. If not, then the lay public in question has basically the same primitive dialect concept that we first find in the writings of the Greeks, where no consistent te~inological distinction is drawn between ‘languages’ on the one hand and ‘dialects’ on the other.

The ‘continuum’ concept needs to be distinguished carefully from the ‘relational’ concept, because the ‘relational’ concept is much more sophisticated and recognizes that what is at issue is not a matter of greater or lesser differences but of historical relationships between speech communities, and in particular of hierarchical relation- ships. That is to say, it recognizes that a dialect is defined in relation to a language.

Specifically, a dialect is conceived of relationally as a particular subvariety of a language, such that one language can have many dialects, but one dialect cannot have many languages. Furthermore-and this is logically a different point, although it is often confused with the preceding one-on the relational view, the concept of a language is the prior concept and the concept of a dialect is defined in relation to that. The term dialect, in other words, comes to be treated as what logicians would call a ‘two-place predicate’. The essential idea is that to be a dialect is to be the dialect of a language, just as to be a husband or to be a wife are essentially relational concepts. You must be a husband or a wife of someone else. It is not an empirical but a logical requirement of the concept that there must be another person to whom you stand in the relationship of being husband or wife. Similarly, there must exist a language in relation to which a dialect stands as a subvariety. The question ‘What is that dialect a dialect of?’ must make sense, just as the question ‘Who is he the husband of?’ must make sense. And in neither case can the answer be reflexive: that is, you can no more reply ‘It is a dialect of itself’ than you can say ‘He is the husband of himself’.

This relationship between languages and dialects which the relational concept implies is perhaps best summed up by C. E. Reed in his book ttialecrs of American English when he says: ‘languages normally consist of dialects’. In short, language functions as the collective term embracing a certain group of dialects.

The third dialect concept I distinguish is the ‘aggregate’ concept. This is, as it were, the relational concept turned upside down. Instead of starting off with a language and breaking it down into dialects, you start off with individual speakers and aggregate their speech into dialects. In other words, the aggregate concept envisages a dialect as constituted out of the sum total of the linguistic practice of a certain group of

4 ROY HARRIS

individuals. However, the aggregate concept is not relational. A dialect defined aggregationally does not have to be a dialect u~anything else.

A classic example of this ‘aggregate* concept in modern linguistics would be the famous definition proposed by Bloch: ‘A class of idiolects with the same phonological system is a dialect’ (Bloch 1948: 7-8). For purposes of this definition, the term idiolect is defined by Bloch as ‘the totality of the possible utterances of one speaker at one time in using a language to interact with one other person’. (I should perhaps say that it seems to me that Bloch’s concept of an idiolect is totally indefensible, but that does not matter for purposes of my argument here. Nor does it matter that Bloch for some reason focuses just on the common phonological system. which again seems indefensible. The essential point is that his model represents a dialect as an aggregate of idiolects, united by common features.)

We should also note in passing that the aggregate model has been taken one step further by a more recent generation of linguists who are happy to ident@ dialects by reference to a single feature: for exampte, whether or not speakers pronounce final -r. It might be objected that when taken to such an extreme the aggregational concept constitutes an abuse of the traditional term dialect, and other terms have been proposed to replace it. Ch.-J. N. Bailey, for instance, has suggested the single term lect to do duty as what he calls ‘a completely non-committal term for any bundling together of linguistic phenomena’ (Bailey 1973: I I). The possibility of defining a dialect on the basis of a singfe feature is mentioned in the Gut-s (p. 276). but immedi-

ately dismissed as ‘un procCdC artificiel‘.

So to sum up this far, we have three basic concepts or models of what a diafect is, which could be contrasted diag~mmatically as, respectively, points along a straight line separating language A from language B (the ‘continuum’ concept); versus internal segments of a circle, where the circumference represents the whole language and the segments represent its dialects (the ‘relational’ concept); versus any group of single points enclosed by a continuous boundary (the ‘aggregate’ concept).

Let us now ask: ‘Which of these dialect models is Saussure operating with?’

In the case of some linguists the answer to such a question would be perfectly straightforward. It is quite clear, for example, that Bloch is an aggregate theorist. as is Chomsky, insofar as he has any coherent position on this issue. It is equally clear that Bloomfield, on the contrary. is a continuum theorist. But as regards Saussure’s position the answer is not quite so clear. It would appear that he recognized and presented a powerful theoretical case for the continuum model-ind~d, perhaps the most powerful case for it that has ever been presented by anyone-but in the end was forced to ~baIldo~ it.

Much of Part IV of the Gout-s is concerned, directly or indirectly. with the problem of dialect boundaries. This is of interest for various reasons, not the least being that that problem highlights in an interesting way one particular facet of linguistic indeter- minacy. Perhaps the best general discussion of’ indeterminacy in recent years is Love 1990. Love recognizes that orthodox linguists just do not see indeterminacy as a

SAUSSURE AND LINGUISTIC GEOGRAPHY 5

problem at all, or if at all, then only a trivial one. But, as he points out, their dismissal of the problem is itself an indication of the extent to which their thinking is dominated by their basic assumption that languages must be fixed codes. One of the analogies Love uses happens to be very relevant to the present discussion of Saussure. He refers to a well-known problem in phonology about the phonemic status of schwa, and to the orthodox phonologist’s attitude to that problem, which is to shrug one’s shoulders and say ‘Well, we’ll just have to live with it.’ As far as the phonologist is concerned, says Love:

“ .it need no more call into question the existence of the phoneme as a unit in terms of which languages are structured than the fact that there are places on the border between Belgium and the Netherlands whose location in one or the other has never been decided calls into question the existence of national boundaries as entities in terms of which the political world is structured.” (Love 1990: 104-5).

Similarly, there have doubtless been many readers of the Cours who came to Part IV and could not understand what all the fuss was about. (Which may be another reason why its most interesting claims have been ignored.) Surely, they might say, the fact that in particular cases it may be difficult to determine where a dialect boundary runs does not really call in question the existence of dialects, any more than political disputes about frontiers call in question the existence of nation-states. But to use that analogy is itself an indication of having missed the point of Saussure’s argument entirely.

Now there is at least one other concept of a dialect, which does not answer to any of the three traditional models mentioned above. This is the concept adopted by linguistic theorists who take an ‘integrational’ approach to the study of language (Harris 1989). The continuum model, the relationat model and the aggregate model are all realist models. The integrationist view, on the other hand, is that dialects are second-order constructs which are intrinsically ill-defined. In cruder terms, dialects are mythical: in just the same sense and for just the same reasons that standard languages are mythical. And because dialects are mythical, it follows that dialectology cannot be a science. In other words, there is no such object to describe. No descrip- tion: no science. Exactly the same reason why there can be no such thing as a biological study of unicorns. (Of course, there is nothing to prevent anyone from studying the dialect myth, just as in the case of the unicorn. But only a simpleton would think the mythology of the unicorn was part of biology.) From an integrationist point of view, those linguists who still believe that dialects are real are committed to a category error. And the integrationist position on this is in fact very close to Saussure’s.

Saussure was certainly highly sceptical about the misguided positivism which pervaded the dialectology of his day. At one point in Part IV of the Cows, there is a passage which comes near to exposing the dialect myth in terms that an integrationist would approve. That is the passage in which the existence of dialect boundaries is denied and even the existence of what are termed ‘natural dialects’: il n Jo a pas de dialectes naturels (Cows, p. 276). That Saussure made such denial in his lectures seems amply confirmed by the evidence of his students’ notes (Engler 1989, p.457; but see further below).

6 ROY HARRIS

The historical context in which that denial was made is of some importance. The years 1900 to 1910 saw the coming of age of European linguistic geography. It had begun in the previous century with Wenker’s German linguistic atlas of 1881, of which only the first fascicule was ever published. By 1910 there had been published at least partial linguistic atlases of Switzerland and Romania, but the magnum opus

was the Atlas linguistique de le France published between 1902 and 1910 by Gillieron and Edmont. If one had asked any university student in 1910 who was the leading figure in the avant-garde of modern European linguistics, one would almost certainly nof have been told that it was Saussure or any of the Neogrammarians: it would have been Gillieron. As Saussure already realized, it was not the Neogrammarians who were to be his chief theoretical opponents: their day was already over. The real rival to structural linguistics would be the kind of linguistics Gillieron did. And the whole of Part IV of the Cours can be read as a calculated critique of that kind of linguistics.

Gillieron published most of his important theoretical work after Saussure’s death, in the period 191551923. Perhaps his most famous study, the CknPulogie des mats qui dtsignent l’ubeille, was published in 1918. He died in 1926.

Why was Gill&on a rival? Because, in the first place, his approach to language. like Saussure’s, gave priority to synchronic over diachronic studies. In that sense. he had already stolen Saussure’s thunder before the Cows was even published. In the eyes of Gillieron and his followers, it was only a detailed study of the present state of the language which could throw light upon its past history. What the linguistic atlas of France had already shown, as far as they were concerned, was that the history of French must have been far, far more complex and diverse than any of the historical records revealed.

In the second place, linguistic geography as practised by Gillieron was in a position to show that the so-called ‘sound laws’ allegedly discovered by the Neogrammarians were largely illusory. Gilheron subsequently published a study with the subtitle Lu faillite de 1 ‘Ptymologie phonktique, which constitutes a far more detailed and devas- tating attack on the sound laws than is mounted in the Cours. So in these respects, Gillieron’s linguistics was already, at least potentially, more radical and more icono- clastic than Saussure’s.

Thirdly, what Gillieron had to offer, which Saussure’s linguistiqur de lu lrmgur lacked, was an empirical methodology for the linguist. It was simple and attractive. A questionnaire of linguistic items was drawn up. A standardized phonetic notation was used to record the replies of any native speaker who was born and bred in the community being studied; and a random sample was taken of communities spread at approximately equal distances across the linguistic area under investigation. The linguist made no assumptions about the linguistic or other relations between the communities in question, but compared the results obtained for each question on the questionnaire and displayed them cartographically. In this way, in effect. the lan- guage studied was redescribed as a potentially open-ended list of specific linguistic

SAUSSURE AND LINGUISTIC GEOGRAPHY 7

features, each of which at a given synchronic moment occupied a specific geographical space to the exclusion of its rivals.

This was the ultimate reason why Gilheron’s linguistics was unacceptable in Saussurean terms. From a theoretical point of view, his concept of a language was entirely antithetical to Saussure’s. Not only was the methodology completely nomen- claturist (that is, the linguist went around asking informants ‘What do you call this?’ and ‘What is your word for that?‘, as the title of his Gknkalogie study shows), but in the end the linguist constructed a picture of a language which was not a system at

all, but a kind of unordered free-for-all of items of diverse provenance competing with one another for use. Gillieron’s most famous linguistic slogan was Chaque mot a son histoire (‘Each word has its own history’)-which Gillieron intended not as an apology for etymological dictionaries but as a reductio ad absurdum of the notion of sys- tematicity in language. What was anti-structuralist about Gillieron’s linguistics was precisely its unrepentant atomism.

Saussure was certainly astute enough to realize that what Gillieron had on offer could be developed into an alternative basis for constructing linguistics as an empirical science. Gillieron actually made that claim, but not until after Saussure’s death. In 1915 he wrote:

“En voulant soustraire la linguistique B l’examen de la gkographie on la diminue d’un facteur puissant-le plus puissant peut-&tre-qui peut lui dormer le droit d’hre consid&&e comme une w&table science” (Gillkkon 1915: II, p. 10)

To put all this in historical perspective, two other points should be made clear. One is that Saussure was by no means the first theorist to question the existence of dialects. Schuchardt had already claimed that dialects were not real in a famous publication of 1885, and Wenker had reached the same conclusion on the basis of his work for his German linguistic atlas. The other point is that the dialect controversy was bound up with the more notorious sound-law controversy in such a way that there was a kind of natural alliance between theorists who were against dialects and theorists who were against sound-laws. The connexion turned on the fact that the most famous formu- lation of the sound-law thesis (by Osthoff and Brugmann) presupposes the existence of dialects. This it has to do. If dialects do not exist, then neither do the sound-laws; or, at least, the sound-laws then become vacuous. (Some theorists, including integra- tionists, would argue that the sound-law thesis is circular even if dialects do exist; but let us leave that on one side.) Now Saussure’s position on this was consistent, because he was both against dialects and against sound-laws. But Gillieron was in something of an odd position, because although he was very much against sound-laws he seems to have believed in dialects, which is precisely what one might have thought his own research would have made him sceptical about.

But why has the material presented in Part IV of the Cours never been recognized as a critique of Gillieron’s linguistic geography if that in fact is what it is? Part of the answer has to do with the subtlety of Saussure’s argument; but part has to do with the fact that Gillieron, who was a highly combative and controversial figure in the

x ROY HARRIS

linguistics of his day, was subjected to so many outspoken personal attacks from other linguists that, by comparison, what Saussure says would hardly be counted as criticism at ail. Almost certainly, in any case, Saussure would have wanted to distance himself from the very hostile kind of condemnation of Gilheron’s work that was currently being mounted by French linguists such as Antoine Thomas and Maurice Grammont. Thirdly, Saussure believed that Gillitron and his followers certainly had established a fact of cardinal importance; namely, that every linguistic feature has its own area of distribution. Where Saussure differed radically, however, was in the theoretical conclusions to be drawn from this fact.

Some commentators have even seen Saussure and Gilheron as kindred spirits. Iordan, for example, writes:

“Like Saussure. Gillieron concerns himself in the main with the static aspects of language; his linguistics is descriptive, or, in the Saussurian terminology, ‘synchronic’; he does not study language in its earlier phases. nor see it in its past development. If he frequently does take into consideration earlier conditions, it is due to the need for distinguishing one linguistic stratum from another. His conception of language is also analogous to that of Saussure. ‘- (I~rdan/Orr 1970: 194)

Iordan seems to have misread completely the relation between Saussure’s approach and Gilheron’s, although he does point out that they differ in their view of folk etymology. (On Saussure’s theoretical difficulties with this phenomenon, see Harris 1987: 155ff.) However, Iordan actually takes Saussure to task for what he calls his ‘entire failure to appreciate the significance of linguistic geography in the domain of language theory’ (Iordan/Orr 1970: 293). Whereas the likelihood is that Saussure appreciated its potential significance only too well and was consequently anxious to discredit it.

The strategy of Saussure’s critique is subtle: in fact probably too subtle for Saussure’s colleagues who had to put the text of the Cows together after his death. It seems clear that Saussure never in his lectures came out bluntly and attacked Gilheron’s dialectology. Saussure rarely confronts his opponents directly. Instead, he proceeds by showing what needs to be accounted for, how others try to account for it. and then leaving one to draw the conclusion that their account fails where his account succeeds. And he prefers to argue in general terms rather than quote specific instances of what others have claimed. There is remarkably little direct quotation in the Cours or in his lectures.

Saussure’s attack on linguistic geography is two-pronged. He shows: (a) how the linguistic geographers make exactly the same basic mistake about language as was made in the nineteenth century by the Comparative Grammarians; and (b) how the results obtained by linguistic geography actually prove the inadequacy of its own methods. His case may be summarized as follows.

1. 7&e word ‘diakctr ’ itsdj

Saussure begins at the metalinguistic level by raising doubts about this term. “Les idiom-es qui ne divergent qu’a un tres faible de@ sent appeles clialecr~s; mais il ne fatit pas donner a ce terme un sens rigoureusement exact: now verrons. qu’il y a entre le\ dialectes et les langues une difftkencr de quantit6. non de nature.” (Cwr.s. p ‘64)

SAUSSURE AND LINGUISTIC GEOGRAPHY

The text is borne out by students’ notes: .L ce nom est vague et qualifie peu au point de we linguistique” (Engler 1989, p. 443) .‘ B aucun moment, il n’y a a dtablir dam I’ichelle des cram absolus qui demanderont le nom de diulecte plutot que celui d’idiome” (Engler loccit.)

There are two points of interest here. The extreme caution about what the term means suggests perhaps that dialectologists have made the naive assumption that because people talk about dialects then there must indeed be such things in the ‘real world’ (for Saussure, a typically nomenclaturist mistake: Harris 1987: 56ff.). Second, the suggestion that the difference between languages and dialects is quantitative not qualitative, appears to imply an initial commitment to a simple continuum model.

2. ne causes of linguistic variation

Saussure draws attention to all the complications in the distribution of linguistic features that are brought about by historical circumstances of various kinds: invasions, bilingualism, education, the formation of a literary language, and so on (Cows, pp. 265ff; Engler 1989: 443ff.) Mentioning these factors implicitly calls in question whether a simple continuum model corresponds to what we find in reality. it is almost as if Saussure is saying: ‘Well, questions of linguistic variation are much more com- plicated than they look from the pages of a linguistic atlas. You don’t know, for instance, whether the speakers are bilingual, whether they are literate, how long the language has been spoken in that area, and so on. All you really know is that this is what they said on such-and-such a day when the linguist asked them such-and-such a question.’ In other words, he seems already to be giving us in advance grounds for concluding that the linguistic map and the continuum model will turn out to be unreal abstractions. They correspond to an idealization about how language develops if left alone in a vacuum.

3. KJre ‘ideal’ dialect

But even if, for theoretical purposes, we abstract from these complexities, is the abstraction itself coherent?

“Les faits dont il a et& question dans ce chapitre sont si frequents qu’ils pourraient passer pour un facteur normal dam I’histoire des langues. Cependant now ferons ici abstraction de tout ce qui trouble la we de la diversite g~ographique naturelfe, pour considerer le pbtnomene primordial, en dehors de tome importation de langue &rang&e et de tome formation d’une langue litteraire. Cette simplification schematique semble faire tort a la realite; mais le fait nature1 doit etre d’abord titudie en luim2me. ” (Court p. 269; cf. Engler 1989: 448)

Reference to Engler makes it clear that this last sentence is an addition of Saussure’s editors, who were perhaps as puzzled as we may be to explain why Saussure bothers with this bizarre idealization, while admitting in the same breath that it corresponds to no observable linguistic reality whatsoever. Their suggested answer strains both credulity and coherence: lefait naturel doit Ptre dhbord ttudiP en l~i-mime. For if Saussure is right, there is no such fait naturel. A more plausible answer is that a critical examination of the idealization will serve to expose the methodological and explanatory poverty of linguistic geography. In other words, Saussure will take an imaginary situation that is ideally favourable to the kind of analysis offered by

IO ROY HARRIS

Iinguistic geography, and show that evert here linguistic geography is bankrupt. This is exactly what happens in Chapter III of Part IV.

In Section 1 of the chapter we are presented with the case of a language transported from one island to another island by colonisation, giving rise eventually to two distinct dialects on the two islands. Ex hypdmi, there are no external factors intervening, no language-contact situation. So apparently the only variable is geographical. But in such a case the linguistic geographer can tell us nothing at all about why we now have two dialects instead of one. The most. crushing indictment is that presented on pp. 27 I-272, where it is argued that geography (by which is meant physical geography- i.e. topography and climate) is only a secondary factor in dialectal differentiation. What produces variation is time, not space. Linguistic geography fosters an illusion.

“Qu’est-ce qtti a cr@C ces diffbxces? Quand OR croit yue c’est f‘espace ceul. IXI cst victime d’unc illusion.” (Cow-s. p. 271: cf. Engkr 1989: 4.50)

The illusion is that by looking at a map and noting the present distribution of linguistic features we can understand the history of the situation. This is in effect what GilliCron and his followers claimed. Against this Saussure argues that exactly the opposite is true. You cannot understand the geographical distribution unless you can reconstruct the history which led to it; because what the map shows is simply the spatial projection of changes in time. Even if you knew which of the two islancis the colonists originally came from that would not help, because you cannot assume 61 priori that the original settlement has the earlier form of the language. In short. you cannot tell what the relationship is between any two geographically separate forms simply by comparing one with the other.

This was just the mistake made by the nineteenth-century ~omparat~vists. The con- cluding remark of Section I is interesting because it does not appear in the students’ notes, which seems to indicate that at least 9aussure’s editors had seen for themselves the connexion between Saussure’s remarks about linguistic geography and his criti- cism of comparativism (cf. CouI:(, p. 16ff.):

“L’unitti des iilinmes apparent& ne se retrouve yue dims lc tcmps, C’est un principe dent II’ comparatiste doit se pCnetrer s’il ne veut pas itre vietime de ficheuses iilusiow.“ itiwr~. p. 171: cf. Engler 1989: 452)

In short, the illusions of Iinguistic geography perpetuate the errors of Comparative Grammar.

fn Section 2 of the chapter, the same argument is applied to another imaginary case: that of a situation where ex ~~~~~r~?~.~~ a uniform language is initially spoken over a large geographically continuous area. In the previous case, it was the language that moved its geographical location by being transported from one island to the other. In this case, the language stays in the same geographical place, but is subject to internal changes. Logically, there are anly two possibilities. Either the same changes affect all areas, in which case the result will be a new &fat de lungue, but still uniformly spoken over the whote country; or else the same changes will nof affect all areas, in which case the result will be dialectal variation. But whichever is the case, again linguistic geography cannot tell us either why the same changes took

SAWSURE AND LINGUISTIC GEOGRAPHY $1

place everywhere, or why they did not.

In principle, these two types of case examined in Section 1 and 2 of this chapter exhaust the theoretical possibilities of isolating a purely geographical factor in language variation; and what Saussure has shown is that in neither case does linguistic geography get to grips with the problem of explaining how and why dialect variation either develops or fails to develop. In other words, it has no contribution to make to internal linguistics. And this, one can hardly doubt, is the conclusion that Saussure intended should be drawn. What is demonstrated amounts to this: that even if there were geographical factors causally operative in language change, the me~~dology of linguistic geography would be unable to detect them.

The coup de g&x, however, is reserved for the chapter following, where attention is drawn to the importance of distinguishing between an indigenous innovation and a borrowing. As is argued on pp. 283-284 (cf. Engler 1989: 470), without that distinction it becomes impossible in iinguistics to analyse the processes of phonetic change. Not only is linguistic geography incapable of dealing with any distinction between indigenous innovations and borrowings, but it actually obscures such a distinction, precisely because-and the reason is ironic-its method is rigorously synchronic.

Saussure’s own account of linguistic variation, as is well known, appeals to the antithetical social forces of what he called 1 ‘esprib de clocker and ~~~er~o~r~e. These will not be discussed here except to make the point that for Saussure the onfy respect in which geographical factors become relevant in linguistics is insofar as they promote or impede the operation of these social forces. But it goes without saying that in practice it would be extremely difficult to isolate the study of those factors from the operation of political, economic and cultural factors of various kinds with which they are inextricably involved. So a linguistics based on geography, of the kind Gilli~ron stood for, was for Saussure simply a non-starter on practical grounds as well as theoretical grounds.

Finally, what prevents Saussure from going all the way to the integrationist position and simply declaring dialects to be mythical (which is arguably the correct conclusion towards which all the considerations he advances actually point)?

The reason is that Saussure here finds himself in a cleft stick of his own making. He sees what is wrong with all the available realist models of dialect, but neverthetess he is already committed, for theoretical reasons of his own, to finding somewhere or other a minimum linguistic community which can support an &at de lungue-that is, a functioning idiosynchronic system. ff he cannot do that, then he would have to abandon the claim that linguistic conventions are social conventions and, more funda- mentally, the distinction between langue and pnrolc, which is basic to his theory of linguistics. At the same time, he has to show the inadequacies of a positivist linguistic geography of the kind practised by Gillieron, because that implicitly offers a rival theory of what a language is and, notably, a theory which dispenses with the notion of holistic systems altogether.

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The crucial passage here is the one cited above from Cows p. 276. It is worth a closer examination, because it is not without its problems. It contrasts the notion of dialects as contiguous territorial subdivisions of a language (which is one version of the ‘relational’ model) with the notion that every dialect feature has its own geo- graphical distributions even though some of them happen to coincide.

+‘R&s qu’on s’est mis B ttudier chaque phCnom&ne en Iui-meme et k determiner son aire d’extension. it a bien fallu substituer g I’ancienne notion une autre. qu’on peut dkfinir comme suit: il n’y a quc des caractks dialectaux naturels, il n’y a pas de dialectes naturels; ou. ce qui rcvicnt au m@me: ii y a autant de dialectes que de lieux.”

What are meant here by ‘natural dialects’ and ‘natural dialect features? And how is it possible in any case to have dialect features without dialects’? Is not this a contradiction?

From his students’ notes, it is clear that Saussure here cited a dictum of Paul Meyer’s: il y u lies caract&-es dialectam, it n ) u pas de dialectes. The first point to

note is that the adjective ~ff~~~e~ seems to be an addition by Saussure’s editors (cf. Engler 1989: 457). But it is clear from the discussion of the two imagina~ islands that Saussure wants to distinguish between linguistic development which is indigenous. in the sense that it arises within a single finguistic community for reasons which are internal to that community and its linguistic system, and, on the other hand, linguistic development which is the result of the intrusion of factors from outside the linguistic community, from contact with other linguistic communities, which disturb the natural e~~jlibrium of the indigenous system. The editors’ use of the term nature1 is evidentfy an attempt, not altogether a happy one, to bring out this distinction. So any develop- ment which is internal to community A is ‘natural’, but any development which is the result of contact between community A and community B is not ‘natural’.

Unfortunately, this editoriai intervention makes the paradox all the more acute. How can one possibly maintain in that case that there are no natural dialects? For if there are natural dialect features, then the process of dialectal differentiation must also, at least in some cases, be natural too. Saussure’s basic point is rather that the clusters of isoglosses which appear to constitute dialect boundaries are not the chance result of indigenous linguistic differentiation, but always come about as the result of external forces of a political, religious, or economic nature. Hence dialects, in the sense of territoriaf subdivisions bounded by isogiosses, are in a certain sense the artifacts of a methodology-a methodology which gives priority to the establishment of geographical limits.

This, we may note. is the only version of the ‘relational’ dialect concept that Saussure ever discusses; i.e. that in which the notion that fanguages ‘consist of diaiects is interpreted in terms of the division of a linguistic community into discrete, contem~raneous, geographical areas, each of which contributes one of the number of specitic subvarieties which, collectively, constitute la langw at any given time. A forceful rejection of this conception leaves him free qua theorist to relegate all propositions of the form ‘A is a dialect of B’ to external linguistics. In synchronic terms. a statement of this form is simply meaningless. Interdialectal relationships are

SAUSSURE AND LiNGUfSTtC GEOGRAPHY 13

thus excluded from synchronic linguistics, and this safeguards Saussure’s identification of the idiosynchronic system as the only candidate for the role of ultimate ‘linguistic object’. Dialects do not fill the bill, for the excellent reason that dialects do not exist.

So far so good. But why then say: ‘or, which amonnts to the same thing, there are as many dialects as places’? Are not these two quite different propositions? How can they possibly amount to the same thing?

Here again we seem to be dealing with an effort by the editors to interpret Saussure’s thinking, for the phrase ce qui revient au mgme appears in none of the manuscript sources. From these it appears fairly clearly that Saussure’s emphasis was on the incompatib~ljty between two conflicting dialect models-those for which terms suggested above were the ‘continuum’ model and the ‘aggregate’ model. It is only in this sense that the editors are right and the two propositions do amount to the same thing. That is to say, it makes no difference whether you say community A and community B are separated by at least one dialect feature, or co~unity A and community B speak different dialects. But the editors* way of putting the point hardly clarifies the rationale underlying Saussure’s thinking.

To summarize, Saussure is ultimately forced into a compromise, which is in effect to say: ‘Dialects as linguistic objects do not exist. It is true that the linguistic atlases show something, but what they show are just patterns of variational features, and the study of those belongs to external linguistics. However, if you insist on calling some linguistic unit a ‘dialect’ and insist that it must be located on a map, then the only sensible thing to do is treat every place on your map as having its own dialect.’ What this does, in effect, is abandon the continuum model in favour of the aggregate model, on the assumption that for all practical purposes the individual village constitutes the kind of minimum linguistic community that his theory demands.

As a compromise, it may be the best one can do if one has to deal with the problem of giving a concrete geographical location to an abstract linguistic object. Never- theless, it is a compromise that Saussure the theorist should not have been at all happy with. Perhaps his not being happy with it was one of the reasons why the Cours was never published during his lifetime.

For Saussure the choice was between a true synchronic linguistics, which takes la lungue as its unique et ~~~ta~~e objet, and a false synchronic linguistics of the kind represented by linguistic geography, which takes neither la Iangue nor even le dialecte as its true object, but the disembodied linguistic feature, whose migrations in geo- graphical space appear to provide it with a specious life of its own. That is why Part IV of the Cows is not a gratuitous appendix on external linguistics, but an absolutely essential part of Saussure’s argument about the science of language.

REFERENCES

BAILEY, Ch.-J. N. 1973 Vuriahm and Linguistic Theory. Centrc for Applied Linguistics, Arlington.

BLOCH, El. 1948 A set of postulates for phonemic analysis. Language 24.

14 ROY HARRIS