Book reviewReview of With Saussure, beyond Saussure. Between linguistics and philosophy of language. . Münster: Nodus Publikationen, 2022. 169 pp. ISBN 978-3-89323-027-3 € 43
Publication history
Table of contents
The title of the anthology refers to something situated between linguistics and the philosophy of language, with Saussure, but at the same time beyond Saussure, a formulation that, if taken literally, could apply to much of what has been written about language (at least in Europe) since the beginning of the twentieth century. In fact, more than half of the book is devoted to a much narrower field: it deals with certain linguistic theories or ideas developed, mostly in Italy, during the first decades of the twentieth century. The book fits into the wave of Italian historiographical revisionism that has intensified in the last decades (cf. Cosenza 2019), and to which the editors, as well as most of the authors of the volume, have largely contributed (cf. De Palo 2016; De Palo & Gensini, eds. 2017 and 2018). Most of the articles deal with linguistic approaches that lie somewhere between Croce’s extreme “idealism” (priority reserved to the speaking subject) and what the authors of the time, following Vossler (1904), used to call “positivism”, i.e. the nineteenth century’s historical grammar that “tended to consider language as [a superstructure] independent of its speakers” [89], whether conceived as a natural organism (Schleicher), as an institution (Whitney), as a semiological system (Saussure), and so on.
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