LANGUAGE AS DISCOURSE: A RICOEURIAN REFLECTION ON THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE QUESTION IN STRUCTURAL LINGUISTICS

Résumé

Language is discourse in as much as by its use, one communicates with another in diverse ways. An understanding of its social and ontological functions is realized in the articulation of speech as the use of language. This cognition follows the perspectives of ordinary language philosophy which is generally construed on the inter-animation of meanings among constituent words or parts of the sentence. This is at variance with structural linguistics' account. For descriptive success it considers only the form of language which linguistic elements inter-relate as in a system. Is language synonymous with its description alone or its communicative use by people? A phenomenological understanding of language underscores both and explains it as a synthesis of a dialectical process as is encapsulated in Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic phenomenology. The critical, phenomenological and analytic methods are employed in this study. It is discovered that linguistic science adopted the descriptive principles of structuralism. Under its rubrics structural linguistics circumvented the semantic angle in the ever reoccurring but meaningcreative events of language whenever it is being put to use. A philosophy of language complements this objective side to the study of language. The studies further revealed that it was exigent for linguistic science to follow the principles of structuralism in seeking for a homogeneous and unified field as its object of study. Thus, a philosophy of language must anchor around the subject, the 'linguistical' being without whom there will be nothing to be said and explained at all whose existentiality straddles the historical, psychological and sociological conditions of being. Future studies on the human person in its relationship to language and the world of realities must continue to exploit this philosophical perspective that linguistic science turned its back on.