My l991 Fall term as visiting professor in the UFRL (Unité de formation et de recherches linguistiques) at the University of Paris 7 (Jussieu)--that is, not in a Slavic Department--provided me with a slightly distanced view of our field at home, and of trends that might well be encouraged. What is, or was, "Slavic Linguistics"? What defines a "Slavic linguist" today? With the editors' kind invitation, I'll try to share impressions gained through ostranenie.
In the U.S., the imprint of Roman Jakobson is still dominant, in the letter if not in the spirit of Slavic graduate programs. Typically, these require practical knowledge of four or five modern languages; plus the basics of Indo-European, Church Slavonic, and the history of at least two Slavic languages; plus a solid background in the structure, literature and culture of one's major Slavic language and the ability to teach it "at all levels"; plus a second string to one's bow, in the event of dwindling enrollments in the major language. Aside from recently reduced language requirements in a few quarters, administrative economies typically affect the theoretical front, where the bold Jakobsonian "quest for the essence of language" is reflected only in smatterings of Praguean theory. Slavic graduate students who wish to keep up with theoretical linguistics are generally welcome to do so, but not at the expense of "the basics", and on their own time (i.e., by serving as language teaching assistants for the maximum number of years, while attending Linguistics seminars and writing a dissertation).
Since the length of training in Slavic has begun to upset graduate school deans, the field is at last granting its linguists permission to specialize, i.e., to remain ignorant of certain areas--just as Linguistics departments have long been forced to do in order to turn out Ph.D.'s in four or five years. The result is a widening gap between linguists in the two kinds of departments. If the prevailing attitude in Linguistics departments is captured by the famous example sentence First she called him a philologist, and then he insulted her, many a vestigial linguist in a Slavic department has chosen to reaffirm identity as a philologist, doing humanistic research on language--on its history and culture, or on its communicative and poetic functions--that is closer to the central departmental mission of a Slavic faculty. Meanwhile, Linguistics departments have not gained linguists-who-know-Slavic, and are unlikely to do so as expansion slows.
In France, just as in North America, the passing of the older generation of Slavic linguists has brought shrinkage--typically, two eminences depart, only one is replaced. Thus, when the major Slavic program in France (at Paris 4, Sorbonne) lost René L'Hermitte and Jacques Veyrenc, one of the positions went to philologist Jean-Paul Sémon; the other, temporarily filled by writer Andrei Sinyavsky "to allow him to earn an adequate pension," resurfaced after Sinyavsky's retirement with a literary occupant. Similarly, the Université de Provence at Aix-en-Provence, with the two well-known linguists Paul Garde and Marguerite Guiraud-Weber, has now lost Paul Garde to retirement.
France's analogue to our own arduous training, the rite of passage called the "Agrégation", has brought a French version of Catch-22. The Agrégation exam, comparable in difficulty to, say, Harvard's Ph.D. generals, qualifies one to teach in a French lycée (including college-level preparatory courses for admission to the Grandes Écoles). During the late 60's and early 70's, rebellious young scholars who chose to bypass this archaic hurdle managed to enter academe and achieve job security without it. Today, however, the lack of Agrégation acts as a glass ceiling over some able mid-career people (in Slavic, as in other fields), for the more conservative--and prestigious--institutions look askance at anyone lacking that credential. As a consequence, today's young scholars do present themselves for the Agrégation, but the threshhold keeps ratcheting up. It was informally explained to me that, since lycee openings have shrunk to nearly zero,[fn 1] the examiners try to prevent an embarrassing surplus of unemployed agrégés. A candidate who could not be faulted on substantive issues might still be failed for, say, a less commanding classroom personality than the two or three other top candidates. Even those who never intend to teach in a lycee (and are thus unlikely to pass the examiners' scrutiny) will still find research careers blocked--for lack of Agrégation.
Contributing to the loss of interest in Russian in the lycées is another development specific to France, where the Communist Party, which collapsed along with the Soviet Union, had been a major source of support for Russian studies. One lasting product is the majestic Dictionnaire français-russe: à l'usage des francophones, compiled over a period of 25 years by Vladimir Gak and J. Triomphe (Moscow: Russkij jazyk/Paris: Editions Librairie du Globe, 1991, 1055 pp.). The publication party hosted by the Globe bookstore (rue de Buci), which I attended with doctoral student Rémi Camus, was perhaps the swan song of this collaboration. We saw only one other academic Slavist there--Jean-Pierre Benoist.
Among Slavic departments, the one at Paris 8 (Vincennes-St. Denis) has embraced Cultural Studies. The trajectory of its sole linguist, Jacqueline Fontaine, who does hold the Agrégation and is known for her books on the Prague Circle (1974) and on the functioning of aspect and determiners in text grammar (1983), parallels that of Slavists in the U.S. who now develop discourse theory and apply it to literary analysis. The latest volume of Revue des Études Slaves contains Fontaine's article on the expression of conditions across sentence boundaries in 65(1), while the next issue, 65(2), contains her theoretical explication of the heterogeneous modes of discourse in Bulgakov's Belaja gvardija. The move of Paris 8 from Vincennes to St. Denis has tended to reduce contacts among linguists, especially since office space is so scarce that scholarly work can only be done at home. One useful resource for linguists of all persuasions (but dominated by generativists) is Les Amis de Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes, a group that conducts occasional meetings,[fn 2] publishes collections of papers, and issues an annual listing of members' recent publications.
There is one enormous advantage that France, like other European countries, has over the U.S. It has research institutes (the Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques (CNRS), the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, and others), plus a program of fellowships for scholars from the former Eastern Bloc countries that is independent of the need to staff Russian language classes or any other teaching. This enables France to attract more strong, theory-oriented linguists from Slavic countries than we do to the U.S., where the majority of visiting slots are in small departments with primary focus on language pedagogy, not on linguistics. During my term at Paris 7, there was, besides me, a visiting text linguist from Sweden, plus boursiers from Russia, Albania, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria--my office-mate was Jordan Penchev. Shorter-term visitors from various countries, including the U.S., visited seminars, with or without formal lectures of their own.
A series of able boursiers from Russia have worked on Denis Paillard's project, which is described in his own words at the back of this issue, and illustrated in Rémi Camus' entry on eshche raz, also included in this issue. This major initiative, which draws on French functional linguistics (notably the theoretical work of Paillard's recently retired mentor, Antoine Culioli), is based in a department of Linguistics rather than Slavic. The study group brings together (in regular workhops at the UFRL, Paris 7, or in Saturday meetings at the Institut d'Études Slaves) native speaker visitors and French Slavists who are otherwise isolated in their respective departments. The native speaker boursiers represent, by and large, the "Meaning-Text" approach to lexicography. Under Paillard's leadership, the focus on lavish detail which is the hallmark of that tradition is tempered by the practical goal of creating a usable dictionary of reasonable size and cost. This endeavor continues collaborative French-Russian projects on the interaction of discourse particles with intonation contours (viz. the three CNRS collections entitled Les Particules énonciatives en russe contemporain (I, 1986; II, III, 1987).[fn 3]
Another productive endeavor, also housed in a Linguistics rather than a Slavic unit, is the typology seminar run by Zlatka Guentchéva at CNRS/Paris 7. In recent years, the focus has been on ways that grammars signal that the information relayed by the speaker is not based on direct knowledge, but is mediated by inference, hearsay, irony, or emotional filtering; these include, but are not limited to, the verbal categories sometimes termed "evidential" in Slavistics, such as the Bulgarian preizkazno naklonenie and the grammemes opposed to it. A typological approach that includes Slavic and Balkan as well as African and Native American languages sheds interesting light on the organization of these communicative devices in universal grammar. Guentchéva (a native speaker of Bulgarian who is a Director of Research at Paris 7), reports on the seminar's work in "La Catégorie du médiatif en bulgare dans une perspective typologique". Revue des Études Slaves 65(l): 57-72, 1993.[fn 4]
One problem with Slavistics done by linguists (i.e., outside the Slavistic establishment) is that the work appears in journals not normally read by Slavists.[fn 5] While the leading French Slavists continue to publish in RÉS and in monographs of the Institut d'Études Slaves,[fn 6] scattered material in other outlets may be difficult to find. One new outlet is a semiannual journal launched in 1990 whose title, Le Gré des langues, reflects the contributors' witty and graceful enjoyment of the complexity of language (published by L'Harmattan. Editions-diffusion, 7 rue de l'École-Polytechnique, 75005 Paris; subscriptions are 200 FF plus 40 FF overseas postage). Only a few articles deal with Slavic: Rémi Camus' "Autour de da en russe contemporain" (4: 44-63, 1992) finds a unity underlying the several senses of the particle; Patrick Sériot writes on Trubetzkoy, Thomas Lahusen on Azhaev's utopias (both in 5, 1993).
With age, I have come to muse over our field's history; for instance, the extent to which U.S. Slavists' view of Saussure is molded by Jakobson's,[fn 7] and how different the view is from France. In reading a conference paper of Fontaine's about the use of Saussure's name as "garant" by the Prague Circle--to help the Prague upstarts at the First Congress of Linguists win acceptance from the linguistic establishment--I was struck by the irony of historical parallels, for Jakobson's big name played a similar role in bringing the 1962 9th Congress of Linguists to MIT, launching its brand new Linguistics program with a bang. I also met the young linguist Françoise Gadet (Universite Paris 10, Nanterre), author of a book on Saussure, who has been commissioned to write an intellectual biography of Jakobson for Seuil. While not a Slavist, Gadet knows Russian; she interviewed me as one of the last of Jakobson's Harvard students (my 1965 Harvard orals were the last at which Jakobson was present). I take credit for introducing Fontaine and Gadet, who have since done joint work on Saussure and Jakobson.
Before glasnost', Western Slavists rarely shared information about collaboration with Soviet colleagues for fear of compromising them (and Soviet Slavists rarely cited Western work, perhaps for similar reasons). Since glasnost', however, we have learned that we linguists in all Western countries have long had radial relationships with many of the same linguists in Slavic countries. To cite just two such examples, E. A. Zemskaja's work appears in Olga Yokoyama's 1993 Harvard Colloquium papers, as well as in RES 65(2); T. M. Nikolaeva has contacts with both the French and the U.S. workers on intonation and discourse particles. Scholars are now strengthening not only the radial links but the circumferential links in the field. My own appointment in Paris was one example; another was last summer's participation in a discourse particle workshop with Paillard's group in Moscow by Harvard doctoral candidate Lillian Parrott. An international network of scholars concerned with Slavic linguistics is reflected in Mélanges offerts à Paul Garde (cf. fn. 6). Periodic invitational conferences of European Slavists are now more open to Americans; e.g., the 1992 conference hosted by Francesca Fici Giusti of the University of Firenze Linguistics department included Slavic linguists from East and West European countries and the U.S.[fn 8]
Once, years ago, when I expressed gloom over the future of Slavic linguistics, Wayles Browne offered a consoling thought: "Don't worry, there will be Slavic linguistics as long as there are Slavic countries." In those countries, as in the rest of Europe, much of the interesting work on Slavic languages is done in Linguistics departments, not in literature-dominated Slavic departments. With the exception of Cornell University's Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, this has not happened in U.S. Linguistics departments, which have been less than welcoming to Slavic initiatives. What can we do to improve things, besides strengthening our radial and circumferential contacts with linguists in the Slavic-speaking world and Slavists beyond it? We must rediscover ways of working across departmental and doctrinal boundaries. As steps in the right direction, I note the relatively open tone of Jindrich Toman's Slavic Syntax Newsletter and the annual conferences on Formal Approaches to Linguistics,[fn 9] and, of course, the founding of JSL. Another hopeful sign is the new seminar on applications of discourse theory to literary analysis co-sponsored at Harvard by Olga Yokoyama and Stanislas Baranczak of the Slavic Department and Susumu Kuno of Linguistics. Rather than grumble over truisms such as each other's state of ignorance, the only way Slavists and Linguists can confront the information explosion in linguistics--and make mutually useful contributions to it--is to work out a division of labor in an atmosphere of mutual respect.
Copyright 1994 Catherine V. Chvany. All rights reserved
Received: Received: 24 February 1994
Dept. of Foreign Languages & Literatures
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
Room 14N311
Cambridge, MA 02139
cvchvany@mit.edu
[fn 1] I was told that, in all of France, there were just two lycée openings in Russian in 1991-92.