Saussure’s Interdiscourses

William Whitney and the Foundation of Language Science

Abstract

The study of language in the 19th century faced a great challenge: defining itself as a science at a time when there was a strong tendency to associate the term “science” only to biology, chemistry, and physics. It was imperative to remove language studies from the natural sciences and constitute an autonomous linguistic science in the humanities. Studying this period through a bibliographical research, we find a central character in this change of course: the North American William D. Whitney, who made a considerable effort to combat the tendencies of affiliating language studies to natural sciences and establish Linguistics as a field of knowledge on its own. Given the scenario described, the aim of this article is to analyze Whitney’s contributions to the foundation of linguistic science and to the widely known ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure. When studying the life and work of Whitney, we observed that he anticipated many concepts we find in Course of General Linguistics, attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure. Our primary motivation was then to understand these direct influences of Whitney on the Genevan professor’s work by carrying out a historical-comparative study. As a result, we know a little about how the statements that changed the course of linguistic science in the 19th and 20th centuries first passed through the work of the North American professor. Because of Whitney’s research, language studies changed direction: they left the field of natural facts to inscribe themselves in historical and social facts and find the definition of language as a system.