Emile Benveniste

First published fifty years ago, Emile Benveniste's two-volume Problemes de linguistique generale revolutionized the study of linguistics and remains among the most influential texts in the field. This expanded edition of the first volume presents the original English translation by Mary Elizabeth Meek, produced in close collaboration with Benveniste himself, along with his hitherto untranslated articles on play, translation, singular and plural forms, and Indigenous North American languages. These works are contextualized by an introduction by editor Jordan K. Skinner and a preface by Roland Barthes. This new edition will delight linguists and philosophers already familiar with Benveniste and introduce his work to a new generation of students. Benveniste studies are going through an enthusiastic revival in Europe; after reading this book, readers elsewhere will understand why.

Benveniste's lectures had a shaping influence on a generation of scholars that includes Barthes, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva and Todorov and here, for the first time, these are made available in English for a new generation of linguists and philosophers of language. This book includes the full course of fifteen lectures which Benveniste gave in the College de France on the rue des coles in Paris between December 1968 and December 1969. Benveniste's work as offered here presents the first serious attempt at reconciling the sign theories of Saussure and Peirce and draws together, language, writing and society into a comprehensive theory of signifying. Benveniste's philosophy of language considers key concepts such as utterance, enunciation, speaker, discourse, subjectivity and as such is central to the areas of discourse analysis, text linguistics, pragmatics, semantics, conversational analysis, stylistics and semiotics.

Benveniste's lectures had a shaping influence on a generation of scholars that includes Barthes, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva and Todorov and here, for the first time, these are made available in English for a new generation of linguists and philosophers of language. This book includes the full course of fifteen lectures which Benveniste gave in the College de France on the rue des coles in Paris between December 1968 and December 1969. Benveniste's work as offered here presents the first serious attempt at reconciling the sign theories of Saussure and Peirce and draws together, language, writing and society into a comprehensive theory of signifying. Benveniste's philosophy of language considers key concepts such as utterance, enunciation, speaker, discourse, subjectivity and as such is central to the areas of discourse analysis, text linguistics, pragmatics, semantics, conversational analysis, stylistics and semiotics.

Since its publication in 1969, emile Benveniste's Vocabulaire here in a new translation as the Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society has been the classic reference for tracing the institutional and conceptual genealogy of the sociocultural worlds of gifts, contracts, sacrifice, hospitality, authority, freedom, ancient economy, and kinship. A comprehensive and comparative history of words with analyses of their underlying neglected genealogies and structures of signification and this via a masterful journey through Germanic, Romance, Indo-Iranian, Latin, and Greek languages Benveniste's dictionary is a must-read for anthropologists, linguists, literary theorists, classicists, and philosophers alike. This book has famously inspired a wealth of thinkers, including Roland Barthes, Claude Levi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Giorgio Agamben, Fran ois Jullien, and many others. In this new volume, Benveniste's masterpiece on the study of language and society finds new life for a new generation of scholars. As political fictions continue to separate and reify differences between European, Middle Eastern, and South Asian societies, Benveniste reminds us just how historically deep their interconnections are and that understanding the way our institutions are evoked through the words that describe them is more necessary than ever.