LANGUAGE AND TIME1

The first thing that strikes one when he studies the facts of language is that, for the talking subject, their succession in time is nonexistent: he faces a state. And so the linguist who wants to understand that state must make tabula rasa of everything that has produced the state and ignore diachrony. He cannot enter the consciousness of talking subjects except by suppressing the past. The intervention of history can only corrupt his judgment. (de Saussure 1975: 117; my translation) Once you have begun by separating diachronic from synchronic … you can never really put them back together again. If the opposition in the long run proves to be a false or misleading one, then the only way to suppress it is by throwing the entire discussion on a higher dialectical plane. (Jameson 1972: 18)2 When I am invited to an exchange where linguists talk about language and time I come to such a meeting with a certain baggage; I have an idea — most likely incomplete but hopefully not wrong — of what organizers and partici-pants have in mind. Some of the issues are reflected in contributions to this conference: conceptions of time based on linguistic representations of encoding of time in morphology, syntax, semantics, and the construction of texts; and the uses of linguistic data and methods in reconstructing historical sequences of socio-cultural developments. If topics such as linguistic evidence for population movement, genetic relationship among languages, and language change3 do not show up on this occasion this reflects the scope of actual submissions, not that of possible applications of linguistics to questions of time or history. A larger 1 Prepared for presentation/discussion at a symposium on “Language and Time ” at the Universit