А в диалоге культур посредством информационных технологий по-прежнему важна роль языка как древнейшего универсального средства общения. Именно поэтому лингвистика во взаимодействии с математикой, философией и информатикой пережила своё второе рождение и продолжает развиваться поныне. Тенденция настоящего продолжится и в будущем - «until the end of the world», как 15 лет назад предсказывал всё тот же В. Вендерс. Правда, неизвестно, когда произойдёт этот конец - но важно ли это сейчас, ведь будущее рано или поздно всё равно станет настоящим.

Приложение 1

The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) is widely considered to be the founder of modern linguistics in its attempts to describe the structure of language rather than the history of particular languages and language forms. In fact, the method of Structuralism in linguistics and literary studies and a significant branch of Semiotics find their major starting point in his work at the turn of the twentieth century. It has even been argued that the complex of strategies and conceptions that has come to be called "poststructuralism" - the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and others - is suggested by Saussure's work in linguistics and anagrammatic readings of late Latin poetry. If this is so, it can be seen most clearly in the way that Saussure's work in linguistics and interpretation participates in transformations in modes of understanding across a wide range of intellectual disciplines from physics to literary modernism to psychoanalysis and philosophy in the early twentieth century. As Algirdas Julien Greimas and Joseph Courtes argue in Semiotics and Language: An Analytic Dictionary, under the heading "Interpretation," a new mode of interpretation arose in the early twentieth century which they identify with Saussurean linguistics, Husserlian Phenomenology, and Freudian psychoanalysis. In this mode, "interpretation is no longer a matter of attributing a given content to a form which would otherwise lack one; rather, it is a paraphrase which formulates in another fashion the equivalent content of a signifying element within a given semiotic system" (159). In this understanding of "interpretation," form and content are not distinct; rather, every "form" is, alternatively, a semantic "content" as well, a "signifying form," so that interpretation offers an analogical paraphrase of something that already signifies within some other system of signification.

Such a reinterpretation of form and understanding - which Claude Levi-Strauss describes in one of his most programmatic articulations of the concept of structuralism, in "Structure and Form: Reflections on a Work by Vladimir Propp" - is implicit in Saussure's posthumous Course in General Linguistics (1916, trans., 1959, 1983). In his lifetime, Saussure published relatively little, and his major work, the Course, was the transcription by his students of several courses in general linguistics he offered in 1907-11. In the Course Saussure called for the "scientific" study of language as opposed to the work in historical linguistics that had been done in the nineteenth century. That work is one of the great achievements of Western intellect: taking particular words as the building blocks of language, historical (or "diachronic") linguistics traced the origin and development of Western languages from a putative common language source, first an "Indo-European" language and then an earlier "proto-Indo-European" language.

It is precisely this study of the unique occurrences of words, with the concomitant assumption that the basic "unit" of language is, in fact, the positive existence of these "word-elements," that Saussure questioned. His work was an attempt to reduce the mass of facts about language, studied so minutely by historical linguistics, to a manageable number of propositions. The "comparative school" of nineteenth-century Philology, Saussure says in the Course, "did not succeed in setting up the true science of linguistics" because "it failed to seek out the nature of its object of study" ([1959] 3). That "nature," he argues, is to be found not simply in the "elemental" words that a language comprises - the seeming "positive" facts (or "substances") of language - but in the formal relationships that give rise to those "substances."

Saussure's systematic reexamination of language is based upon three assumptions. The first is that the scientific study of language needs to develop and study the system rather than the history of linguistic phenomena. For this reason, he distinguishes between the particular occurrences of language - its particular "speech-events," which he designates as parole - and the proper object of linguistics, the system (or "code") governing those events, which he designates as langue. Such a systematic study, moreover, calls for a "synchronic" conception of the relationship among the elements of language at a particular instant rather than the "diachronic" study of the development of language through history.

This assumption gave rise to what Roman Jakobson in 1929 came to designate as "structuralism," in which "any set of phenomena examined by contemporary science is treated not as a mechanical agglomeration but as a structural whole [in which] the mechanical conception of processes yields to the question of their function" ("Romantic" 711). In this passage Jakobson is articulating Saussure's intention to define linguistics as a scientific system as opposed to a simple, "mechanical" accounting of historical accidents. Along with this, moreover, Jakobson is also describing the second foundational assumption in Saussurean - we can now call it "structural" - linguistics: that the basic elements of language can only be studied in relation to their functions rather than in relation to their causes. Instead of studying particular and unique events and entities (i.e., the history of particular Indo-European "words"), those events and entities have to be situated within a systemic framework in which they are related to other so-called events and entities. This is a radical reorientation in conceiving of experience and phenomena, one whose importance the philosopher Ernst Cassirer has compared to "the new science of Galileo which in the seventeenth century changed our whole concept of the physical world" (cited in Culler, Pursuit 24). This change, as Greimas and Courtes note, reconceives "interpretation" and thus reconceives explanation and understanding themselves. Instead of explanation's being in terms of a phenomenon's causes, so that, as an "effect," it is in some ways subordinate to its causes, explanation here consists in subordinating a phenomenon to its future-oriented "function" or "purpose." Explanation is no longer independent of human intentions or purposes (even though those intentions can be impersonal, communal, or, in Freudian terms, "unconscious").

In his linguistics Saussure accomplishes this transformation specifically in the redefinition of the linguistic "word," which he describes as the linguistic "sign" and defines in functionalist terms. The sign, he argues, is the union of "a concept and a sound image," which he called "signified [signifie] and signifier [signifiant]" (66-67; Roy Harris's 1983 translation offers the terms "signification" and "signal" [67]). The nature of their "combination" is "functional" in that neither the signified nor the signifier is the "cause" of the other; rather, "each [derives] its values from the other" (8). In this way, Saussure defines the basic element of language, the sign, relationally and makes the basic assumption of historical linguistics, namely, the identity of the elemental units of language and signification (i.e., "words"), subject to rigorous analysis. The reason we can recognize different occurrences of the word "tree" as the "same" word is not because the word is defined by inherent qualities - it is not a "mechanical agglomeration" of such qualities - but because it is defined as an element in a system, the "structural whole," of language.

Such a relational (or "diacritical") definition of an entity governs the conception of all the elements of language in structural linguistics. This is clearest in the most impressive achievement of Saussurean linguistics, the development of the concepts of the "phonemes" and "distinctive features" of language. Phonemes are the smallest articulated and signifying units of a language. They are not the sounds that occur in language but the "sound images" Saussure mentions, which are apprehended by speakers - phenomenally apprehended - as conveying meaning. (Thus, Elmar Holenstein describes Jakobson's linguistics, which follows Saussure in important ways, as "phenomenological structuralism.") It is for this reason that the leading spokesperson for Prague School Structuralism, Jan Mukarovsky, noted in 1937 that "structure . . . is a phenomenological and not an empirical reality; it is not the work itself, but a set of functional relationships which are located in the consciousness of a collective (generation, milieu, etc.)" (cited in Galan 35). Similarly, Levi-Strauss, the leading spokesperson for French structuralism, noted in 1960 that "structure has no distinct content; it is content itself, and the logical organization in which it is arrested [or apprehended] is conceived as a property of the real" (167; see also Jakobson, Fundamentals 27-28).

Phonemes, then, the smallest perceptible elements of language, are not positive objects but a "phenomenological reality." In English, for instance, the phoneme /t/ can be pronounced in many different ways, but in all cases an English speaker will recognize it as functioning as a /t/. An aspirated t (i.e., a t pronounced with an h-like breath after it), a high-pitched or low-pitched t sound, an extended t sound, and so on, will all function in the same manner in distinguishing the meaning of "to" and "do" in English. Moreover, the differences between languages are such that phonological variations in one language can constitute distinct phonemes in another; thus, English distinguishes between /l/ and /r/, whereas other languages are so structured that these articulations are considered variations of the same phoneme (like the aspirated and unaspirated t in English). In every natural language, the vast number of possible words is a combination of a small number of phonemes. English, for instance, possesses less than 40 phonemes that combine to form over a million different words.

The phonemes of language are themselves systematically organized structures of features. In the 1920s and 1930s, following Saussure's lead, Jakobson and N. S. Trubetzkoy isolated the "distinctive features" of phonemes. These features are based upon the physiological structure of the speech organs - tongue, teeth, vocal chords, and so on - that Saussure mentions in the Course and that Harris describes as "physiological phonetics" ([1983] 39; Baskin's earlier translation uses the term "phonology" [(1959) 38]) - and they combine in "bundles" of binary oppositions to form phonemes. For instance, in English the difference between /t/ and /d/ is the presence or absence of "voice" (the engagement of the vocal chords), and on the level of voicing these phonemes reciprocally define one another. In this way, phonology is a specific example of a general rule of language described by Saussure: In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system. ([1959] 120)

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