From fieldnotes to grammar Artefactual ideologies of language and the micro - methodology of linguistics

Preface: what linguists have made of it Most standard textbooks and historical accounts state that linguistics as a modern science started with the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de Linguistique Générale in 1916. In this posthumous compilation of course notes, Saussure outlined a new and fully scientific discipline, the object of which would be langue: the stable and structural patterns of language, patterns and structure that appear to be common to and to underlie the vast diversity of actual utterances people make. This new object, Saussure argued, could be systematically studied in its own right, as an object that offered exclusive access to linguists and would not have to be shared by other scholars of language – philologists, historical linguists, early anthropologists. Saussure's intervention created linguistics as an autonomous science; but this science had been defined by just a fraction of what could be studied as 'language'. Reviewing this momentous move, Asif Agha comments: " The project is, first of all, extractionist: It pulls out from the totality of langage a fraction called langue, singling it out for exclusive attention. The extraction of the object of linguistics is achieved by a metonymic reduction: a part replaces a whole. Second, it is restrictivist in a specific sense: it reflexively equates the boundaries of a discipline with the study of the object extracted. A Saussurean linguistics is expressly not the study of language. It is the study of langue. (…) And, third, it is exclusionist in a correspondingly langue-dependent sense: all those whose interests lie beyond the study of langue, or language structure, are excluded from the happy few upon whom the honorific title of " linguist " may be conferred. " (Agha 2007: 222) Thus, Saussure's definition of langue as the exclusive object of the (equally exclusive) science of linguistics did more than what it claimed: it not only created a new science, but also delineated a community of subscribing practitioners as well as a set of boundaries between such practitioners and practitioners of competing or overlapping approaches to language: " A langue-centric constitution of an object sphere (and its associated episteme) now articulates the epistemic (social) project of a discipline by restricting tightly the sphere of epistemic concerns that count as " doing linguistics " , and hence delimits for its practitioners, within the larger sphere of their concerns with language, the activities they 3 do as linguists. " …