The general meaning as a potential

ABSTRACTThis article examines the idea of the “potentiality” of language phenomena as expressed by Vilém Mathesius in 1911, and its relation to the debate on the general or basic concept of a linguistic category, discussed by Roman Jakobson, Louis Hjelmslev and others around 1935. We track the concept of potentiality in Roman Jakobson’s and Louis Hjelmslev’s texts from the period, then we point out similarities with ideas expressed by Émile Benveniste around the same time. Next, we examine Mathesius’ very different idea of potentiality as the state of linguistic expressions that may be otherwise. However, by tracking the problem through Mathesius’ later texts, I follow how his theorization gradually develops to converge with Jakobson’s. I will stress the importance for Mathesius as a professor of English philology of the problem of the sentence, with a focus on the Focus-Topic articulation theory in the whole process.KEYWORDS: SyntaxpotentialityRoman JakobsonVilém MathesiusLouis HjelmslevEmile Benveniste AcknowledgementThis article has been produced within the Cooperatio program (field: Literature) of Charles University in Prague.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 The whole conceptualisation of structural linguistics in the 1920s and 1930s in terms of ‘schools’ and ‘circles’, attributed to various European cities, is a specific methodological approach to the history of sciences especially used by scholars connected with the Czech tradition of writing about the Prague School (Sládek Citation2015; Toman Citation1995; Volek Citation1985). In spite of neglect and open criticism for its tendency to narrativisation and ideologisation (Daszuta Citation2018; Gierowski Citation2010; Sériot Citation2017), this approach still bears a certain explicative power. We adopt it as our starting point, not in an effort to adhere to its methodology but to have some elementary heuristic perspective and also, because some participants of the debate itself, namely Jakobson, have a propensity to see events in these terms (see Jakobson’s review of the 1936 congress in Copenhagen, Jakobson Citation1936).2 We are using a theorisation of the genitive by Karel Hausenblas, a continuator of the Prague School linguistics, and, in a way, heir to Jakobson’s analysis.3 We have tried to demonstrate how Émile Benveniste’s thought in the 1960es may be connected to the texts of Vladimír Skalička, tracking the possible connection to the 1948 essay “The need for the linguistics of ’la parole’” (Krásová and Koblížek Citation2019).4 The problem of the phoneme and its definition is of course one of the seminal topics of the Prague school. Investigating Mathesius’s role in the debate is unfortunately out of the range of this article.5 We refer here not to the real nature of the Neogrammarian linguistics, but to the specific role it has in Mathesius’ thinking. For Mathesius, the Neogrammarian school represents the unfortunately strict application of the idea of a law, combined with a wrong idea of language development as an organic process: “The influence of natural history and exact sciences, most drastically manifested by Schleicher’s conception of language as a biological organism, has led, in the Neogrammarian school, to an aprioristic belief in the absolute regularity of sound-laws and thus acted in the same direction.” (Mathesius Citation1964, 26)6 (Mathesius Citation1939, 171). The conceptual couple “východiště – jádro” is later reworked either as theme – rheme within the „functional sentence perspective“ (FSP) theory (see for example Dušková Citation2019, 11–12), or as topic and focus in the “Topic-Focus Articulation“ (TFA) approach (for the best discussion, see Hajičová, Partee, and Sgall Citation1998).7 Libuše Dušková in her recent article on the FSP practically maintains the mathesian position: “In inflectional Czech, word order primarily indicates the FSP structure: in neutral (non-emotive, non-emphatic) sentences the theme as a rule stands at the end and the theme in the preverbal part of the sentence, irrespective of their syntactic functions since the clause elements are distinguished by inflectional endings and agreement in gender and number. In other words, the linear arrangement in Czech displays the basic distribution of communicative dynamism. The grammatical function of Czech word order plays a minor role, e.g., in the fixed position of the preposition before the noun in the prepositional phrase (…). In analytical English the FSP and the grammatical functions of word order are hierarchically reversed. The FSP function plays a minor role since sentence position primarily indicates syntactic function” (Dušková Citation2019, 12).8 Mathesius has a significant sympathy for Bally’s attitude, expressed alongside the quotation from Wundt: “Wundt is concerned, of course, mainly with the semantic changes occurring in the development of language. A really thorough analysis of the semantic side of language was supplied only by the Geneva linguist Ch. Bally in his monograph Traité de stylistique française. This book, fortunately, is no stylistic manual in the usual sense of the word and its importance is not limited to French; it presents a really static [= synchronistic, J. V.] semantic analysis based on reliable linguistic, not psychological, foundations. The rich chapters of this book constantly remind the reader of the semantic oscillation in speech, i.e., of another of its aspects of potentiality.“ (Mathesius Citation[1911] 1964a, 21). We should note that the quoted “static semasiology” (statická sémasiologie, Mathesius Citation[1911] 1964a, 16) was translated by Vachek as “static semantic analysis”, obscuring its connection to the saussurean project.9 Based on Patrick Sériot’s distinction between “ontological” and “epistemological” structuralism (Sériot Citation2012, 282–288), we have tried to show how in some cases, the source may be tracked down to Antoine Meillet (Krásová Citation2021). See also (Vachek and Dušková Citation1983, 241–253).10 It is worth noticing that the text establishes the notion of “enunciation” for the predicative content of the sentence, and that it develops it form the psychological approach. Mathesius notes: “By the terms ‘theme’ and ‘enunciation’ I mean what is usually called the psychological subject and psychological predicate, respectively” (Mathesius Citation[1928] 1964b, 67, n. 1).Additional informationNotes on contributorsEva KrásováEva Krásová (*1983) is a researcher in the history of structuralism and semiotics and Assistant Professor in the Department of Czech and Comparative Literature of The Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. She has published articles on various topics of interwar linguistics, focusing on the intellectual sources of Prague structuralism. Her other main interest is narrativity in modern popular culture.