S0271-5309(96)00005-5 'UNDOUBTEDLY A POWERFUL INFLUENCE ' : V ICTOR HENRY 'S ANTINOMIES LINGUISTIQUES (1896), WITH AN ANNOTATED TRANSLAT ION OF THE F IRST CHAPTER

The inclination to resolve the internal antinomies of this complex notion is the motivating force of Saussure's Course. In this respect, he master from Geneva had an illustrious predecessor among French linguists. Victor Henry, professor of comparative grammar at the Facult6 des Lettres in Paris, addressed precisely this question in his book Antinomies linguistiques, published in 1896... This book, in which the questions, moreover, hold greater interest han the answers, undoubtedly exerted a powerful influence on Saussure's Course (Jakobson, 1942 [1990, pp. 89-90]). At the time of its publication, Antinomies linguistiques (Linguistic Paradoxes) by Victor Henry (1850-1907) garnered a small number of reviews and was hardly ever cited. The first record of a linguist paying serious attention to it is a quarter-century later, when Charles Bally (1865-1947) devoted an article to the distinction drawn in the book's third chapter between 'transmitted ' and 'learned ' language (Bally, 1921). After another decade the preeminent European linguist of mid-century, Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), would begin referring to Antinomies linguistiques as the direct predecessor and inspiration for the Course in General Linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), the cornerstone of the twentieth-century study of language, which Bally had co-edited. And Jakobson'