Realism in European Structuralism

Abstract

Realism, descriptivism, and the objectivity of language are the main issues considered in selected Arabic critiques of Saussurean structuralism. It is contended that the term realism has been used in Arabic linguistic literature to denote two methodological claims that may be related: the first is prescriptive judgment and the second is the exclusion of theoretical or interpretive intervention from linguistic analysis. While the first claim can be broadly accommodated within the framework of descriptive linguistics, the second invites more careful consideration. Saussure’s conception of langue as a system of relations cannot be equated with the direct notation of observable speech since structuralist analysis presupposes distinctions at the level of analysis (langue et parole; synchrony et diachrony; valeur différentielle des signes). The present work bases its analysis of the reformulations of realism and objectivity in Arabic metalinguistic discourse on selected Arabic works by Haider Al-Jubouri, Hafiz Isma'ili Alawi, and Abd al-Qadir Abd al-Jalil, and reads them in juxtaposition with Saussure's Course in General Linguistics and some recent scholarship on the editorial history of the Course. It argues, at the end of the day, that linguistic objectivity is not the absence of theoretical abstraction; it is rather the explicit, disciplined, and evidence-based use of analytical categories toward which descriptions of language tend. Thus, the paper has implications for the study of Saussurean reception in Arabic linguistic thought and for other debates concerning the epistemological grounds of linguistic description...