Mutations in linguistics during Modernism and Postmodernism Migliore Riccardo Olivato Federico Olivato Riccardo Tiberio Marco

What linguistics is Each human language is a complex of knowledge and abilities enabling speakers of the language to communicate with each other, to express ideas, hypotheses, emotions, desires, and all the other things that need expressing. Linguistics is the study of these knowledge systems in all their aspects: how is such a knowledge system structured, how is it acquired, how is it used in the production and comprehension of messages and how does it change over time.

Characteristics of linguistics during the Victorian Age The myth of progress and the idea of a self-made man; Religious crisis: man felt lost, no reference points; Philosophical crisis (F. Nietzsche): necessity of meaning after the loss of God

Characteristics of linguistics during the Modernism The discovery of the unconscious by Sigmund Freud Meaning is the object of a quest Linguistics tries to find out the true nature of meaning using the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified

Characteristics of linguistics during the Postmodernism The crisis of the principle of authority There is no absolute truth Crisis of Capitalism and the idea of a finite unique self According to Derrida there is no meaning because it is always differed

Jacques Derrida Derrida’s work, which would come to be called deconstructionist, suggests that worlds have a multiplicity of meaning. Every individual comes to a text with personal experience and backgrounds that color interpretation, and therefore no reading of a text should be preferred over any other. When expanded beyond literature, the theory of deconstruction comes in direct conflict with all systems that judge some things as correct and some as incorrect. The deconstructionist theories of Jacques Derrida are said to have been an influence on the French student uprising of May 1968.

Ferdinand de Saussure Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. According to him, the signifier and the signified can’t be separated, but as they’re inseparable there’s an arbitrary relationship between them. It is demonstrated when different languages use different signifiers to express the same meaning.