Language and history by Michel Foucault and Eugen Coseriu: a comparative analysis

The point in common of the French philosopher Michel Foucault and the German linguist (and philosopher of language) Eugen Coseriu (who wrote in several languages, Spanish and French, German and Italian) is that they belonged to the latest ("third") generation of structuralists. Structuralism moved beyond particular disciplines (linguistics, ethnology, history) and became an interdisciplinary philosophical methodology of human sciences. Also, it preserved a particular interest in classic problems of philosophy and linguistics: being of language, history and historicity, sign and meaning. This paper aims to compare the main ideas of both scholars about the connection of language and history. The author of the paper shows that the structuralism of Foucault and Coseriu tried to solve the antinomies of the classical philosophy of language: synchrony and diachrony, structure and change, derivation and determination (classical philosophy of language was often based on the methodology of physical sciences). Our authors solved some important antinomies of classical structuralism, but they seem to have created some other ones, especially those of conscientious and unconscientious structures in linguistic activity.

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