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Benveniste's lectures had a shaping influence on a generation of scholars that includes Barthes, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva and Todorov. Here, for the first time, these lectures are made available in English for a new generation of linguists and philosophers of language. This book includes the full course of fifteen lectures that Benveniste gave in the Collège de France on the Rue des Écoles in Paris between December 1968 and December 1969. Benveniste's work as offered here presents the first serious attempt at reconciling the sign theories of Saussure and Peirce and draws together, language, writing and society into a comprehensive theory of signifying. Benveniste's philosophy of language considers key concepts such as utterance, enunciation, speaker, discourse and subjectivity and, as such, is central to the areas of discourse analysis, text linguistics, pragmatics, semantics, conversational analysis, stylistics and semiotics.
Key Features:
*Introduction from editors Jean-Claude Coquet and Irène Fenoglio
*New introduction by the translator John Joseph
*Preface by Julia Kristeva
*Includes Benveniste's course of fifteen lectures
Émile Benveniste (1902-1976) was the pre-eminent linguist in France for three decades beginning in the late 1930s. He worked mainly on Indo-European historical linguistics, but became widely known as a theoretician through the two volumes of his Problems in General Linguistics (1966, 1974) and Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society (1969). This book contains the final lectures he gave before a stroke in December 1969 paralysed and silenced him.
List of contents
Editors' Acknowledgments
Biographical Timeline
Translator's Introduction
, John E. Joseph
Preface: Émile Benveniste, a linguist who neither says nor hides, but signifies
, Julia Kristeva
Editor's Introduction
, Jean-Claude Coquet and Irène FenoglioChapter One: Semiology
Chapter Two: Languages and Writing
Chapter Three: Final Lecture, Final NotesAnnex 1: Bio-bibliography of Émile Benveniste,
Georges RedardAnnex 2: The Émile Benveniste Papers,
Émilie BrunetAfterword: Émile Benveniste, a scholar's fate,
Tzvetan TodorovIndex
About the author
Émile Benveniste (1902-1976) was a French linguist and semiotician and he was Professor of Linguistics at the Collège de France until 1969. His authored works include Problems in General Linguistics published in English in 1973 by the University of Miami Press and the Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society published in English in 2016 by HAU.Jean-Claude Coquet is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Semiotics in the Université de Paris 8.Irène Fenoglio directs the Linguistics section of the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes of the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique.John E. Joseph is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and currently holds a three-year Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. His previous book,
Language and Identity (2004) has found a wide readership among sociologists, political scientists, historians, anthropologists and others besides linguists, many of whom will want to read his
Language and Politics as its successor and complement.
Summary
The last word on language, writing and semiotics by the doyen of French linguistics Emile Benveniste
