"Breal too was set on marking out a new course for linguistics, but he was not disposed to dismiss the the achievements of his predecessors. Nor did he accept uncritically the tenets of the dominant linguistic schools. Though he was responsible for introducing comparative Indo-European grammar in France, he was opposed to its one-sided concern with phonetic change, to its tendency to treat language as an organism that is born, grows and declines, and to neglect of the basic, semantic and social functions of language. The idea that language was a phenomenon of nature struck him as perverse... Instead, he called for a science that would examine the meanings of words and grammatical categories, that would study the development of individual languages, and that would formulate the general laws of linguistic change."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Jacek Juliusz Jadacki, Witold Strawiński. In the World of Signs: Essays in Honour of Professor Jerzy Pelc. 1998, p. 255
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michel_Br%C3%A9al
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Michel Bréal
14 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Michel Bréal →
Related Quotes
"There is another kind of studies which distinguished from the sometimes opposed to comparative grammar. It is known u…"
"Historical grammar is now in a position to confirm or to refute."
"There is a constant succession of books on the subject of comparative grammar, for the use both of students and of th…"
"My intention was to give a general outline, to sketch a general division and, as it were, a provisional plan of a dom…"
"We define law, using the word in the philosophic sense, as the constant relation discoverable in a series of phenomena."
"In that second part we propose to investigate how it happens that words, once created and endowed with a certain mean…"
"The so-called pejorative tendency has yet another cause. It is in the nature of human malice to take pleasure in look…"
"In modern society, the meaning of words changes much more quickly than it did in antiquity or even in the recent past…"
"We must realize the extent to which it is necessary that our knowledge of language be based on history. Only history …"
"Sometimes is a synonym which extends itself, and contrasts by just much the domain of its colleague. At other times i…"