ABSTRACT

Up to Saussure As soon as we look at it at all closely, the difference between the literary and the linguistic study of style becomes evident. Charles Bally points out that until the nineteenth century language was never studied for its own sake.. It was always a question of what advantage could be derived from linguistic study-for the logical formulation of thought, for correctness of style, above all for the understanding of the classical writers, regarded not only as literary models but as linguistic norms. This brought a number of consequences in its train: a reverence for the written language; a corresponding devaluation of the spoken language, which was regarded as vulgar; the superstition of an unchangeable classic language, proper as a model for all time, which should be guarded against all innovation by a jealous purism. The innovations, of course, occurred; the forms of purism changed from age to age, and the situation was complicated by the fact that the ultimately unchallengeable standards were situated in the dead languages, not in the living vernaculars. The idea of a stylistic standard fixed in the past or in another country is deeply rooted in our culture. Horace in the Ars Toetica refers the Latin writers

to Greek models. The prestige of Ciceronian Latin was so high in the Renaissance that it became the obvious duty of the modern prose writer simply to imitate it. True, there were rebellions. Politian defiantly asserted, 'Non Ciceronem me tamen exprimo'—I am not expressing Cicero but myself. This did not, however, prevent generations of schoolboys for 300 years after Politian's time being assiduously trained in the pastiche of Latin prose and Greek verses. When in seventeenth-century England a new generation revolted against the elaborate periodic syntax and the formal decorative rhythms of Ciceronian prose, the alternative first arrived was not to write as one spoke or as the occasion demanded, but simply to switch to another classic model-Seneca instead of Cicero. And 100 years later we find Swift believing that the English language, having reached its stage of classical perfection, should be fixed in that state, and all future deviations should be prevented.