By: Martina Angelini, Jessica Palladini, Valentina Indri, Chiara Venturini, Mara

Nardelli

Previuos decades of XIX century Late decades of XIX century (1880-1900) First decades of XX century (1900-1930

Modernism) From 1950 on (Postmodernism)

HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS

Traditional novel; Charles Darwin; The self-made man; The principle of autority; Faith in progress; Capitalism and industrialization; Charles Dickens; The third person omnicient intrusive narrator;

The myth of progress and the idea of a self-made man;

Religious crisis: man felt lost, no refernce points;

Philosophical crisis (F. Nietzsche): necessity of meaning after the loss of God ( “God is dead”);

Cosmopolitan attitude; New paradigms in the concept of space and time (Albert

Einstein’s theory of Relativity); The idea of simultaneity of time (Henry Bergson the

present is in our consciuosness as the sum of our past memories and future expectations William James);

The discovery of the unconscious ( Sigmud Freud ); Meaning is the object of a QUEST; The nature of the human being across time ( Antropology

myths and rituals ); Linguistics tries to find out the true nature of meaning

( aribitrary relationship between SIGNIFIER-SIGNIFIED ) meaning is something conventional;

Carl Jung “ The Psichology of Unconscious” racial memory;

The crisis of the principle of authority; There is NO ABSOLUTE TRUTH; Interest in LANGUAGE and LINGUISTICS; People give up the SEARCH FOR TRUTH; Crisis of Capitalism and the idea of a finite unique

self; No meaning meaning is always differed (

Jaques Derrida ); Intertextuality; Metafiction;

LANGUE: social movement of language and communication. It must put together things that are understood by everybody. This language is constituted by a code of structure and rules that applies to everyone.

PAROLE: individual moment of language, which everyone has to use the code of the language to express his point of view.

SIGNIFIER:it is what the sign expresses

SIGNIFIED: it is the means to express the signifier (the acustic image)

SIGN

Derridà is the founder of deconstruction as a method of textual analysis applicable to all writing from phylosophy to licteracture;

Decostruction becomes the basic premise of postmodernism ;

This word was taken from the main work of j. derrida “of grammatology” to indicate that comunication is characterized by uncertainty. In addition in his opinion there is no connection between a word (the signifier) and the object to which it’s referred (the signified);

In conclusion it is possible to say that there is a renewed interest in the language as it is relevant to note that the same words placed in different contexts can assume other meanings.