SYNCHRONIE ET DIACHRONIE AU CENTRE ET À LA PÉRIPHÉRIE : DU FOYER PRAGOIS DE STRUCTURALISME FONCTIONNEL

Structuralism is conceived of as a rather unstructured amount of large sets of scholarly works. A very important kind of set is a focus (foyer), a sum of texts which have been produced within and by an intellectual milieu. The texts from one focus are not supposed to use, all of them, one and the same notional apparatus (such a claim would be characteristic of a school, which is a much smaller set of scholarly texts ; there may be several schools in one focus). The texts from one focus are supposed to know of one another, to react to one another, to share certain general goals with one another. In this sense, Prague functional structuralism is a focus, not a school. The Prague structuralist focus is compared here to the Geneva one with respect to the classical Genevan opposition of synchrony vs. diachrony. Since the Praguian functionalist approach leads to quite a different conception of the dichotomy of language and speech (instead of an anti-systemic parole as opposed to a fully-systemic langue, there are concrete texts/utterances as ultima ratio for an inventory of goal-oriented means, which is the language), a systemic view is equally required for both the dimensions of language, i.e. for synchrony as well as for diachrony.