John E. Joseph, « Schizolinguistics, from Tuczek’s Analyse einer Katatonikersprache (1921) to Wolfson’s Le Schizo et les langues (1970) », Language & Communication 106 [2026], pp. 13-29 ; publié en ligne le 5 décembre 2025.
Libre accès : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2025.10.006

Abstract : Attempts to diagnose schizophrenia have been grounded in theories concerning what linguistic deviance reveals about mental function. Tuczek’s patient ‘Frau M.’ was institutionalized for using a language which mixed German and French elements. The psychiatrist Goldstein cherry-picked her utterances to support his advocacy of frontal lobotomy. Louis Wolfson was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy for his intolerance of hearing or seeing English, his mother tongue. His book lays out his phonetic and translinguistic strategies for converting English utterances into other languages. The evidence provided by these cases of schizolinguistics are significant for present-day understanding of the psychology and philosophy of language.

[…]

Wolfson figures […] as one of five writers whose ‘logophilia’ is analyzed by Pierssens (1980), along with Jean-Pierre Brisset (1837–1919) (see Brisset, 1878), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), Roussel […], and Saussure. The only published English translation of part of an article by Wolfson, to my knowledge, is the brief Wolfson (1978), the introductory note to which says that it is the conclusion to his new version of Wolfson (1970), ‘to be called Point final à une planète infernale (“Full stop to an infernal planet”)’.
Pierssens repeatedly juxtaposes Wolfson and Saussure, saying for instance that

Like Mallarmé, Saussure, and Roussel, Wolfson comes face to face with something like a transcendence, an enigmatic being which effects the collusion of a desire and a form. This elusive phantom, some aspect of which escapes from every grasp, whether it be that of science, literature, or whatever, is the sign. (Pierssens, 1980: 60)

Pierssens, along with Sylvère Lotringer (1938–2021) and many others in the 1970s, believed that Saussure’s search for anagrams as a hermetic technique used by poets since ancient times is symptomatic of a madness on his part, which was subsequently cured when he formulated his theory of the linguistic sign. This is important to ponder, because their treatment of Saussure parallels the diagnosis of Frau M. as catatonic and of L∗∗∗∗ as schizophrenic, along with all the others so diagnosed by Goldstein and his fellow psychiatrists. Pierssens actually labels Saussure as ‘schizophrenic’ and ‘paranoiac’ alongside Wolfson.
Wisdom and madness, what is born of the encounter between the sign and desire produces both delight and anguish, despair and hope. [ …] Wolfson roams through Manhattan and even finds a fraternal prostitute; Saussure believes in the solidarity of poets.

Extrait de l’article (§ 3) ; les références sont disponibles à ce lien.

Cristina Altman, «Saussure and the Brazilian ‘scientific grammar’ (1880–1930)», Language & History, publié en ligne le 18 Aout 2025.
Libre accès : https://doi.org/10.1080/17597536.2025.2535231
L’article est également disponible en PDF.

Since his earliest studies on Saussure and some of his contemporaries’ theories, notably those of William D. Whitney (1827–1894) and Herman Paul (1846–1921), Konrad Koerner consistently maintained that Saussure proposed ideas, both in his Mémoire ([1879] 1987), and in his Cours (1916), in agreement with, or in response to, the intellectual climate of his time. So much so that for Koerner, Saussure’s real value lay more in his capacity to synthesise the ideas that were circulating at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries than in being the first to advance certain concepts, perceived as innovative by various of his later readers (cf. Koerner 1971/1973; Koerner 1988, 2020).

In the Brazilian grammatical tradition, the first mention of Saussure is attributed to the celebrated Brazilian philologist Manuel Said Ali Ida (1861–1953), in the second edition of his Dificuldades da Língua Portugueza (Rio de Janeiro: Besnard Frères, 1919), as translated below:

I have always taken into account, in the various questions I have dealt with, the psychological element as a very important factor in language changes and, investigating the persistence or the instability of linguistic facts, I have taken the Portuguese language as my field of research not only from the literary period that extends from João de Barros¹ to Manoel Bernardes² but also its modern speech and its less studied medieval forms. I was thus able to gather results that give a regular idea of the evolution of the Portuguese language from its emergence to the present moment, from which we can see the reason for [the existence of] certain double dictions,³ which sometimes coexist, sometimes substitute each other, [which has often been] the source of fierce and futile controversies. In these facts, I believe, F. de Saussure would find plenty of material with which to reinforce his luminous assessments of synchronic linguistics and diachronic linguistics. (Ali & Manuel [Ida] 1919: VI, emphasis added)⁴

So, for Said Ali, one of the Portuguese language’s particularities, regarding the divergent forms (‘double dictions’), one popular, and one erudite, could be easily explained if the linguist, instead of legislating, observed them over a period. A form considered popular, or incorrect, at a certain stage of the language evolution, could be the standard in a later stage. No useless controversies were needed, and these facts support Saussure’s appraisals on synchronic and diachronic linguistics, Said Ali concluded.

Some historiographers in Brazil have given this isolated mention of Saussure an anachronistic interpretation, notably Mattoso (1961/2004: 224), followed by Bechara (1962, 2008) and, more recently, Cavaliere (2018), who saw in Ali a visionary anticipation of the structuralist framework.

In a comprehensive study on the early beginnings of European structuralism, Koerner (1975: 724) rightly observed that no linguist would seriously claim that language is not in some way organised and is merely a conglomerate of isolated terms. In this sense, all linguists would be ‘structurally oriented’ to a certain extent. But being structuralist as we have come to understand it today cannot be applied to Ali’s grammatical writings, any more than to any of his contemporaries in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century. Rather than a precursor of what would become the structuralist framework, Said Ali was a synthesiser of the normative, pedagogically oriented grammatical tradition and the new demands for a scientifically oriented grammar building on a historical-comparative form.

Extrait de l’article (« Introduction ») ; les références sont disponibles à ce lien.

John E. Joseph, « Koerner, Saussure, Chomsky: an eternal upbraiding of the ‘Great Man theory’ », Language & History, publié en ligne le 14 aout 2025.
Libre accès : https://doi.org/10.1080/17597536.2025.2535222
L’article est également disponible en PDF.

For his doctoral research, Koerner was fortunate to have the manuscript resources provided by Robert Godel (1902–1984) (Godel 1957) and the first volume of the critical edition of the CLG by Rudolf Engler (1930–2003), as well as the annotated Italian translation of the CLG by Tullio De Mauro (1932–2017), with De Mauro’s notes and additional material not appearing in French translation until 1972. This additional material includes a biography of Saussure that is extraordinarily rich given what limited material was available at the time. One of its key sources was an autobiographical account by Saussure which Godel had published (Saussure 1960), and which was accepted unquestioningly – until another half dozen versions that Saussure drafted came to light, in which some key events are related differently, making it impossible to take everything it says at face value². Nevertheless, it offered insights into Saussure’s background and character that would remain unique until his correspondence became public, starting with Benveniste (1964).
The abstract to Koerner (1971a) states that whilst his study ‘constitutes a contribution to general linguistic theory and to the history of linguistics’, he has chosen to centre it on Saussure on account of three ‘traditional assumptions’, which, however, Koerner does not accept:
– Saussure has been almost unanimously regarded as the founder of modern structural linguistics;
– his posthumous Cours de linguistique générale has generally been interpreted as a complete break with previous theories of language, in particular those of the Junggrammatiker, and
– modern linguists have tended to regard his achievements as the creative act of a genius who was completely independent of the intellectual atmosphere of his time. (Koerner 1971a, iii).
He declares that, ‘because our own findings do not confirm this’, he will challenge not merely these assumptions but the entire ‘manner in which the history of linguistics has been written’ (ibid.). It was no empty boast.
What Koerner opposes is, above all, historical discontinuity, which tends to go hand in hand with the ‘Great Man theory’ of history. The discontinuity can be both diachronic, as in (2) above, and synchronic, as in (3). The ‘Great Man theory’ is a legacy of the Romantic hero, encapsulated in the dictum that ‘The History of the world is but the Biography of great men’ (Carlyle 1841, 47). Much of Koerner’s work, from the dissertation onward, would be aimed at rescuing and recording the important contributions of men and women who were not generally reckoned to be Great. As for those who were deemed Great, one rarely finds Koerner denying the importance of their work; rather, he aims to show how their giant stature has been achieved by standing upon the shoulders of less famous predecessors and contemporaries.

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