Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Soviet Linguistics of the 1920s and 1930s and the Scholarly Heritage
- 3 ‘Sociology’ in Soviet Linguistics of the 1920–30s: Shor, Polivanov and Voloshinov
- 4 Theoretical Insights and Ideological Pressures in Early Soviet Linguistics: The Cases of Lev Iakubinskii and Boris Larin
- 5 Early Soviet Linguistics and Mikhail Bakhtin's Essays on the Novel of the 1930s
- 6 Language as a Battlefield – the Rhetoric of Class Struggle in Linguistic Debates of the First Five-Year Plan Period: The Case of E.D. Polivanov vs. G.K. Danilov
- 7 The Tenacity of Forms: Language, Nation, Stalin
- 8 The Word as Culture: Grigorii Vinokur's Applied Language Science
- 9 Language Ideology and the Evolution of Kul'tura iazyka (‘Speech Culture’) in Soviet Russia
- 10 Psychology, Linguistics and the Rise of Applied Social Science in the USSR: Isaak Shpil'rein's Language of the Red Army Soldier
- Appendix 1 Introduction to Japhetidology: Theses, Ivan Meshchaninov
- Appendix 2 Glossary of Names
- Appendix 3 List of Contributors
- Notes
- Index of Names
1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Soviet Linguistics of the 1920s and 1930s and the Scholarly Heritage
- 3 ‘Sociology’ in Soviet Linguistics of the 1920–30s: Shor, Polivanov and Voloshinov
- 4 Theoretical Insights and Ideological Pressures in Early Soviet Linguistics: The Cases of Lev Iakubinskii and Boris Larin
- 5 Early Soviet Linguistics and Mikhail Bakhtin's Essays on the Novel of the 1930s
- 6 Language as a Battlefield – the Rhetoric of Class Struggle in Linguistic Debates of the First Five-Year Plan Period: The Case of E.D. Polivanov vs. G.K. Danilov
- 7 The Tenacity of Forms: Language, Nation, Stalin
- 8 The Word as Culture: Grigorii Vinokur's Applied Language Science
- 9 Language Ideology and the Evolution of Kul'tura iazyka (‘Speech Culture’) in Soviet Russia
- 10 Psychology, Linguistics and the Rise of Applied Social Science in the USSR: Isaak Shpil'rein's Language of the Red Army Soldier
- Appendix 1 Introduction to Japhetidology: Theses, Ivan Meshchaninov
- Appendix 2 Glossary of Names
- Appendix 3 List of Contributors
- Notes
- Index of Names
Summary
While there can be little doubt that the period between the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the outbreak of World War Two saw an extraordinary upsurge in innovative approaches to language in Russia and then the USSR, only isolated examples have reached an Anglophone audience beyond a relatively narrow circle of Slavists. This is especially regrettable since many of the questions that now occupy theorists of language and society were those with which early Soviet linguists grappled, and one can still learn a considerable amount, both positive and negative, from this experience. As the work of what have become known as the Bakhtin and Vygotskii Circles began to appear in translations in the late 1960s, structuralist and then poststructuralist approaches to language became dominant in Western scholarship in the humanities. This movement was led by scholars who often claimed to be giving language due consideration for the first time, and who, polemically, presented previous approaches in caricatured form, as outdated and naïve theorizing that either unwittingly or willingly made common cause with Stalinist totalitarianism. As a result of this, the newly translated Russian texts appeared as exceptions that proved the rule, covertly subverting the official Soviet position and so anticipating, in fragmentary form, the new French-led paradigm. Just as these approaches arose in Europe, so in the United States William Labov led a bold attempt to catalogue and theorise social variations within American English by synthesizing dialect geography, attempts to define language as a social rather than natural science, and US writings on language contact and conflicts of the 1950s into a new discipline that was to be known as sociolinguistics (Koerner 2002).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Politics and the Theory of Language in the USSR 1917–1938The Birth of Sociological Linguistics, pp. 1 - 16Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2010