Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Soviet Linguistics of the 1920s and 1930s and the Scholarly Heritage
- 3 ‘Sociology’ in Soviet Linguistics of the 1920–30s: Shor, Polivanov and Voloshinov
- 4 Theoretical Insights and Ideological Pressures in Early Soviet Linguistics: The Cases of Lev Iakubinskii and Boris Larin
- 5 Early Soviet Linguistics and Mikhail Bakhtin's Essays on the Novel of the 1930s
- 6 Language as a Battlefield – the Rhetoric of Class Struggle in Linguistic Debates of the First Five-Year Plan Period: The Case of E.D. Polivanov vs. G.K. Danilov
- 7 The Tenacity of Forms: Language, Nation, Stalin
- 8 The Word as Culture: Grigorii Vinokur's Applied Language Science
- 9 Language Ideology and the Evolution of Kul'tura iazyka (‘Speech Culture’) in Soviet Russia
- 10 Psychology, Linguistics and the Rise of Applied Social Science in the USSR: Isaak Shpil'rein's Language of the Red Army Soldier
- Appendix 1 Introduction to Japhetidology: Theses, Ivan Meshchaninov
- Appendix 2 Glossary of Names
- Appendix 3 List of Contributors
- Notes
- Index of Names
2 - Soviet Linguistics of the 1920s and 1930s and the Scholarly Heritage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Soviet Linguistics of the 1920s and 1930s and the Scholarly Heritage
- 3 ‘Sociology’ in Soviet Linguistics of the 1920–30s: Shor, Polivanov and Voloshinov
- 4 Theoretical Insights and Ideological Pressures in Early Soviet Linguistics: The Cases of Lev Iakubinskii and Boris Larin
- 5 Early Soviet Linguistics and Mikhail Bakhtin's Essays on the Novel of the 1930s
- 6 Language as a Battlefield – the Rhetoric of Class Struggle in Linguistic Debates of the First Five-Year Plan Period: The Case of E.D. Polivanov vs. G.K. Danilov
- 7 The Tenacity of Forms: Language, Nation, Stalin
- 8 The Word as Culture: Grigorii Vinokur's Applied Language Science
- 9 Language Ideology and the Evolution of Kul'tura iazyka (‘Speech Culture’) in Soviet Russia
- 10 Psychology, Linguistics and the Rise of Applied Social Science in the USSR: Isaak Shpil'rein's Language of the Red Army Soldier
- Appendix 1 Introduction to Japhetidology: Theses, Ivan Meshchaninov
- Appendix 2 Glossary of Names
- Appendix 3 List of Contributors
- Notes
- Index of Names
Summary
In the second decade of the twentieth century two historical events occurred that were quite incommensurable, but which exerted a decisive influence on the development of the study of language in Russia and then the USSR. The first was the February and October Revolutions of 1917 and the social changes that followed in their wake, and the second was the paradigm shift in linguistics, traditionally connected with the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale (1916), which also first became known in Russia in 1917.
Of course paradigm shifts do not occur all at once. New ideas of one type or another were announced before Saussure, and in Russia many ideas appeared significantly earlier, with the conceptions of Mikolaj Kruszewski and Jan Baudouin de Courtenay proving especially important. Yet in Russia, as in other European countries, the nineteenth-century linguistic paradigm, based on the recognition of historical linguistics is the only scientific method, and the comparative-historical method as the only rigorous method, continued to dominate the discipline until 1917, and in many respects even longer. One example will suffice. In Russia today, and in the USSR before that, courses in contemporary Russian language maintain a leading place in the training of student philologists, who specialize in Russian. Yet Petr S. Kuznetsov recalled that when on completing his postgraduate studies in 1930, he had to teach a course on the contemporary Russian language, he did not know what to do at first.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Politics and the Theory of Language in the USSR 1917–1938The Birth of Sociological Linguistics, pp. 17 - 34Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2010
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