Hugo Schuchardts Beitrag Zur Allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft

Abstract

Summary This article attempts to rehabilitate Hugo Schuchardt (1842–1927) as a general linguist. It tries to show that the many polemics of his take all their source in a rejection of a reifying vision of language, be it his critique of the ‘organicist conception of language’ (largely associated with the work of August Schleicher), of the ‘blind action of phonetic laws concerning any given dialect’ (a position held by the Neogrammarians), or of the Saussurean dichotomies. Instead, Schuchardt prefers a conception of language as a dynamic activity in which the individual and society as well as the mixture of languages play a central part. As a result, Schuchardt’s interest in and focus on (what appeared to many of his contemporaries as) marginal phenomena (creoles, pidgins, language contacts, universal language) is not a matter of accident, but directly related to his permanent and rigorous questioning of the dominant tenets in the field, a position he thought to be essential to any progress in linguistic science.