Enrique Bernárdez, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

1. Linguistics became independent from philology and literary studies.
2. It then approached language in its own way, according to its own ideas and interests. Language and languages came to be viewed as autonomous entities, typically conceptualised in terms of systems of signs. Neither the minds of speakers nor the culture of the speaking community were granted any significant role.
3. This was never universally true for all linguists, although those who held alternative views tended to be marginalised from the core doctrinal framework.
4. Moreover, this perspective corresponded to a thoroughly Western conception of language and its study. It was the WEIRD people who developed these viewpoints.
5. Subsequently, emerging from certain marginal perspectives, a new way of understanding these matters began to take shape. The focus shifted from the isolated symbolic system to the minds of speakers – their cognitive system. Thus began the cognitivist view of language, although it had already been tentatively proposed on several occasions since the late nineteenth century by authors who, at the time, attracted little attention. The development of the cognitive view of language is a well-documented subject; let us move beyond it.
6. Also drawing on proposals and ideas from scholars of, indeed, “remote times”, language came to be seen as a cultural phenomenon – not isolated, nor merely individual, but rather communal. Language was viewed as part of culture, at once its transmitter and an element that ensures the community’s and its culture’s continuity through time. The proposed relationships between culture and concrete linguistic phenomena, however, remained rather underdeveloped. Moreover, there never existed a definition of culture (or of language) that met with universal approval. In cultural studies as well, scholars began to think in cognitive terms, recognising that culture must also reside in the minds of the members of a group, just as language does. Yet, for a significant part of Western philosophical thought, there existed a perceived incompatibility between the individual and the collective.
7. Finally, a “unification” was achieved – a topic to which we shall devote the entire second part of this seminar.