Philosophical Thinking is Yoga for the Mind®

SUBWAY LINE, No. 10

Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. provides apublication venue for original philosophicalthinking steeped in lived life, in line with ourmotto: philosophical living & lived philosophy.

Lev Petrovich Yakubinsky

ON DIALOGIC SPEECH

Translated from the Russian, edited and with a Foreword by Michael Eskin

Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc.New York • 2016

Published by Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. P. O. Box 250645, New York, NY 10025, USA

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English translation copyright © 2015 by Upper West SidePhilosophers, Inc.

Parts of “On Dialogic Speech” have previously appeared in PMLA112.2 (1997) and are used by permission.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataYakubinsky, Lev Petrovich, 1892-1945, author.[O Dialogicheskoy Rechi. English]On dialogic speech / translated from the Russian, edited andwith a foreword by Michael Eskin.

pages cm"Published in 1923, O Dialogicheskoy Rechi is the first studydevoted entirely to the forms of speech in their concrete, socialand inter-subjective manifestations."ISBN 978-1-935830-34-41. Discourse analysis, Literary. 2. Yakubinsky, Lev Petrovich,1892-1945--Translation into English. I. Eskin, Michael, transla-tor. II. Title.P302.5.Y3513 2016401'.41--dc23

2015031793

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CONTENTS

Translator’s Foreword / 7

1. The Functional Diversity of Speech / 19

2. The Forms of Utterance / 29

3. Unmediated Communication / 33

4. Dialogue is Natural, Monologue is Artificial / 43

5. Dialogue Compared with Oral andWritten Monologue / 51

6. The Apperceptive Moment in Understanding / 57

7. Everyday Patterns and Dialogue / 69

8. Dialogue and Speech Automatism / 71

Acknowledgments / 77

* “O Dialogicheskoy Rechi” was first published inRusskaya Rech: Sborniki Statey, edited by L. V. Schcherba(Petrograd, 1923), 96-194. All notes areYakubinsky’s,except for the translator’s notes in brackets. Through-out this essay, all translations are the translator’s unlessotherwise indicated.

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TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

Published in 1923, On Dialogic Speech is the firststudy devoted entirely to the forms of speech intheir concrete, social and intersubjective mani-festations. It is also the first study addressing thelinguistic, psycho-physiological, pragmatic, se-mantic and socio-political aspects of dialogueand dialogic interaction – both oral and written– which the author implicitly aligns with theweakening of authority and power (as opposedto the natural “alliance that monologue has withauthority”).* Thus, On Dialogic Speech anticipates

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the Bakhtin circle’s influential writings on thetransformative power of dialogue, as well assuch contemporary disciplines and areas of ‘aca-demic activism’ as socio- and cognitive linguis-tics, pragmatics, cognitive science, and culturaland postcolonial studies, insofar as the latter ap-propriate and strategically implement the con-cept and potential of dialogue as a liberatingforce. Moreover,Yakubinsky can also be said todescribe and theorize, avant la lettre, our con-temporary culture of texting, tweeting, messag-ing and emailing – the twenty-first-centuryequivalents of “passing notes” (in class, meetingsand son), which the author singles out as aunique hybrid “between mediated (written) andunmediated (properly dialogic) communica-tion.” Given the topical and historical significance

of On Dialogic Speech and given thatYakubinsky’spivotal role in the development of modernthought and linguistics has been widely ac-knowledged,it is all the more surprising that hehas remained virtually unknown outside his na-tive Russia – an intellectual-historical lacuna

*Among others, such eminent critics as B. Eikhen-baum, V. Erlich, A. Leontyev, K. Pomorska and M.Holquist have pointed out Yakubinsky’s significance.†The neogrammarian school in linguistics originatedin Leipzig, Germany, in the 1870s, and subsequentlymade its way to Russia. Advocating a positivist ap-proach to language, it postulated the existence of a pri-ori phonological laws and held that the description ofthe historical transformations of language(s) shouldtake precedence over considering living speech in itsgenerative aspects. Eduard Sievers (1850-1932) andAugust Leskien (1840-1916) were two of the school’smajor representatives in Germany. F. F. Fortunatov(1848-1914), professor at Moscow University, was theschool’s most prominent proponent in Russia.

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On Dialogic Speech

that the present English edition of On DialogicSpeech seeks to fill.*

*Russian linguist L. P. Yakubinsky (1892-1945)attended the University of Petersburg from1909-1915, during a period of academic re-newal and challenge in Russian linguistics,which had hitherto been dominated by the neo-grammarian study of language.† The neogram-marians’ positivist and historicist approach wascontested by a range of young scholars con-

* The society adopted the acronym OPOYAZ (Ob-shchestvo po Izucheniyu Poeticheskogo Yazyka).

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cerned with the functional and social diversityof language as an individual and collective activ-ity.In this heated atmosphere of reevaluation and

transition, Yakubinsky, together with some of hisfellow students and colleagues, such as OsipBrik and Viktor Shklovsky, founded, in 1916, theSociety for the Study of Poetic Language, thus initi-ating the movement that would subsequently godown in history under the moniker ‘RussianFormalism’ (without which in turn such schoolsof thought and criticism as structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction would be un-thinkable).* In fact, the functional distinctionbetween “poetic” and “practical” language thatYakubinsky worked out in the same year in hisgroundbreaking essay “On the Sounds of PoeticLanguage” became the very cornerstone ofRussian Formalism – the “the basic principle,”as fellow Formalist B. Eikhenbaum noted, for

* Thus Eikhenbaum in his 1926 essay “The Theory ofthe Formal Method.”

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On Dialogic Speech

its approach to the “fundamental problems ofpoetics.”*

*Yakubinsky soon moved away from the Formal-ists’ preoccupation with poetry and literature,however, and devoted himself to exploring thesocial dimension of the functions and forms oflanguage in their “phenomenal immediacy.” Thismove can be interpreted in at least three ways:(i) as a continuation of the work of his universityteachers Jan A. Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929) and Lev V. Shcherba (1880-1944), bothof whom insisted on the necessity to study lan-guage in its functional multiplicity and as a man-ifestation and expression of social interaction;(ii) as a result of political developments duringthe early years of the Soviet Union and Yakubin-sky’s joining the Communist Party, which op-posed Formalism’s lack of interest in the ideo-logical and political significance of literature and

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art (– ironically, in coming down on the side ofdialogue as opposed to monologue, On DialogicSpeech undermines its author’s ostensibly ‘pro-totalitarian’ ideological beliefs); (iii) finally, as aconsequence of Yakubinsky’s theoretically andpolitically motivated opposition to Ferdinand deSaussure’s (1857-1913) hugely influential workin linguistics, which had been gaining popularityamong Russian scholars since the posthumouspublication of his Course in General Linguistics in1915.Yakubinsky objected to several of Saussure’s

basic postulates: to his insistence on the “impos-sibility of a revolution” in language and, hence,the impossibility of political action in andthrough language; to his presupposition that the“law of fate” rules linguistic evolution andchange, which cannot be voluntarily and con-sciously effected by (individual) speakers; to hisabstract notion of a “social mass of speakers” andhis disregard for the concrete interaction be-tween speakers; finally, to his fundamental claimas to the “arbitrariness of the sign” and his con-comitant contention that linguistic and lexe-

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On Dialogic Speech

matic preferences lack motivation. And althoughYakubinsky did not explicitly publicize these ob-jections until the appearance of his essay “F. deSaussure on the Impossibility of a Politics ofLanguage” in 1931, in which he condemns Saus-sure’s overall “abstract formal-logical approach”and his blindness toward the “concrete realityand intricateness” of individual and collectivelinguistic activity, On Dialogic Speech can alreadybe read as a blueprint for a non-Saussurean ap-proach to language and society.

*Last but not least, On Dialogic Speech can also beviewed as articulating a counterposition to theso-called ‘linguistic turn’ in the humanities atthe beginning of the twentieth century. Whilethinkers such as Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russelland Ludwig Wittgenstein were elaborating theall-encompassing role of language in our rela-tion to reality, the world and ourselves, Yaku-binsky emphasized the importance of attendingto the extra-linguistic – external and internal –conditions determining our use of language. In

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other words, if Wittgenstein famously con-tended that “the boundaries of our language arethe boundaries of our world,” then Yakubinskycan be taken to suggest that the boundaries ofour psycho-physiological, material existence arethe boundaries of our language.

*The present translation of On Dialogic Speech isan abridged version of Yakubinsky’s originalessay. For the contemporary English reader’sconvenience, those passages have been omittedor shortened that reiterate, repeat or provideadditional illustrations for points already madewith sufficient clarity (such as Yakubinsky’s par-tial retelling of Guy de Maupassant’s novella“Family Life” in part 7); extensively engage withuntranslated scholarly works by Yakubinsky’sRussian contemporaries for purposes of schol-arly method and additional evidentiary corrob-oration; recap or polemicize against others’research and arguments that are merely tangen-tial to Yakubinsky’s own (such as an extensive

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On Dialogic Speech

summary, in part 1, of Aristotle’s discussion ofpoetry and metaphor in Poetics).

ON DIALOGIC SPEECH

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1THE FUNCTIONAL DIVERSITY OF

SPEECH

Human speech assumes a variety of forms. Itsdiversity manifests itself not only in the exis-tence of innumerable languages, dialects and id-ioms – including the jargons of different socialgroups and individuals – but also within anygiven language, idiom or dialect (even withinthe idiolect of a single individual), and it is func-tionally determined by a complex network offactors that must be taken into account in anyattempt to study language in its phenomenal im-mediacy, and to explain its genesis and history.

*Language is coextensive with the diversity ofhuman behavior, which is a psychological or bi-

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ological fact if viewed as an expression of thehuman organism, and a sociological fact ifviewed in light of its rootedness in the social, in-teractive life of human organisms.Thus, the fac-tors determining speech will belong either tothe psychological or the sociological order.

*The psychological rootedness of speech enjoinsus to distinguish between the following basicmodalities: speech as a function of normal,pathological and irregular physiological states,respectively, and speech as a function of mindand emotion. Although all of these modalities(possibly with the exception of irregular physi-ological states) have been widely noted in con-temporary linguistics, there is hardly any con-crete research on the diverse manifestations ofspeech and its dependence on one or the otherof its determinant factors and states. Linguisticsand speech pathology do not share their find-ings. Speech as a function of emotion has notbeen studied at all – even the basic data have notyet been collected (with the exception of data

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On Dialogic Speech

concerning the use of words, but even here theresults are far from satisfactory). The impact ofemotion on pronunciation, too, has hardly beenexplored. Linguistics is especially ill preparedto deal with speech as a function of irregularphysiological states, such as the state of poeticinspiration, a better understanding of whichwould allow us to isolate those aspects of lyricpoetry that are the products of physiology ratherthan art.

*The sociological determinants of speech can bebroadly and preliminarily categorized as fol-lows: (i) the conditions of interaction, in bothfamiliar and unfamiliar environments; (ii) theforms of interaction (mediated/unmediated,one-/two-sided); (iii) the concrete goals of in-teraction (practical/artistic, neutral/hortatory).

*The study of language in its dependence on theconditions of interaction constitutes the foun-dation of contemporary linguistics. The complexdiversity of speech (languages, dialects, idioms