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
8 - The Word as Culture: Grigorii Vinokur's Applied Language Science
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
A brilliant linguist, Grigorii O. Vinokur (1896–1947) stands out from the famous 1920s constellation of Russian/Soviet linguistic and literary scholars as a theoretician of applied linguistics and the proponent of language culture (kul'tura), a specifically utilitarian language science, which laid the foundation for Soviet scholarship in the social and cultural history of language, and theory of language usage, including but not confined to stylistics.Whilst in a broader sense Vinokur used the term ‘language culture’ to refer to verbal practices of a society, more specifically it also presents one of the many models of sociological linguistics, developed and employed by Soviet theorists and language practitioners in the immensely language-conscious period of the 1920s and early 1930s. Also referred to as ‘linguistic technology’, Vinokur's language culture in its second, narrower, meaning offers perhaps one of the most consistent attempts at a methodological delineation of the newly emerging branches of social and human sciences in Soviet scholarship. Against the advance of the so called vulgar sociologism in literary criticism and linguistics, Vinokur sought to delimit the boundaries of linguistics, poetics and sociology with the help of a scientifically sound method which, for him, had been outlined in Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale [Course in General Linguistics] (1916). What is, however, less obvious, but certainly no less important, is that Vinokur undertook the unique task of reviving philology as a distinct field of knowledge and a methodological system in his outwardly Saussurean – and what is expected by extension to be a rigidly linguistic – approach.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Politics and the Theory of Language in the USSR 1917–1938The Birth of Sociological Linguistics, pp. 123 - 136Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2010