LINGUISTICS IN MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM

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LINGUISTICS IN MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM
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Why did linguistics studies develop between the
end of the 19th century and the beginning of the
20 century?

• In order to answer to this question, the reader
  analyzed
• The context
• Writers, and thinkers that analyzed linguistics

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The context
A crisis of values during the end of the 19 th
century

• In Great Britain

Puritanism
Darwinism
Utilitarism
Break the Competition
A crisis of values
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A crisis of values

• Darwinism Theory of natural selection. God
  didnt create human race No reference points,
  the most importante existential crisis ever
  recorded

• Religious crisis, F. Nietzsche God is dead
• Economis crisis Marxism offered and optimistic
  view for the future, Utilitarism and capitalism
  it offered wealth for rich but poverty for the
  remaining of the population

The human being had got no points of reference
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Semiotic, linguistics and modernism

• The modernist philosophic paradigm can be
  expressed as the following search for the truth,
  a Quest

• Writing permits the analysis, the development of
  new ideas and objectivity

• Linguistics became important because, through the
  way man speaks, thinkers that studied linguistic
  can understand how the man himself behave.

• Look for an understanding of the self in the
  context of the world/society through the study of
  language.

Idea of author
Idea of subject
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Linguistics

• Ferdinand de Saussure(1857 1913)
• Jacques Derrida(1930 2004)

• Linguistics explains how the world works meaning
  is the result of a construction

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Ferdinand de Saussure

• Language is a system of signs, a semiotic system
• Synchroinic language meaning is unstable and is
  constructed through difference, binary pairs
• Signs are the unions of the signifer and the
  signified

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Jacques Derrida

• Developed Saussures ideas

• Theres no link between the signifier and the
  signified
• Once a text is written it ceases to have a
  meaning until a reader reads it
• There is nothing but the text and that it is not
  possible to construct something ab nihilo.

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In conclusion

• Why did linguistics studies develop between the
  end of the 19th century and the beginning of the
  20 century?
• After the period of depression in Great Britain
  during the end of the 19th century, the human
  being lost all his points of reference. In order
  to search a balance, linguistic became important
  because the study of the way man speaks and his
  relationship with texts and the signifier can
  make himself conscious of his identity and the
  relationship with reality.

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Credits

• Cisilino Stefano
• Mongera Enrico
• Talian Lorenzo
• Zanutta Riccardo