Franco Fanelli

The paper shows the role of endophonic prosody and its function in determining the order of written discourse. Linguistic analysis often developed a model of language primarily intended as written language, probably because, as Bakhtin says, in the writing you look at the statement and not at the utterance, and you lose sight that even the statement is the result of an utterance now observed in conditions other than those of its production.  Following this thesis, here we claim that phonic and endophonic prosody is crucial for production and reception of written messages.
The first part of the essay discusses the Saussurian linearity of significance and shows how also Saussure referred to inner speech in explaining the succession of phonemes. The second part addresses the issue of “ambiguity”, from which Chomskian theory moves, and claims that this kind of ambiguities are an intrinsic factor of writing technology, as the semantic relevance of syntax is not original, but it is derived from written use of language.

In this paper I explored three aspects of oral discourse: prosody, oral language and memory, poetic function. Looking to the role of prosody in oral discourse, I pointed out that  the intonation shows in a very clear way the supremacy of semantics over grammar and that oral language is essentially a phonic-acoustic technology that we use to share our social experience. A proper valuation of its sound and musical implications is basic to understand how oral discourse becomes a meaning maker and a knowledge agent.
Then I addressed the relation between oral language and memory and I illustrated the phonic-acoustic facilities and the mnemotechnical media used by oral cultures to help the transmission of their knowledge.
Finally I examined the dynamics of orality in Western culture following the fundamental analysis by Eric Havelock, scholar of classical age, on oral tradition and on Greek poetry. Discussing his observations I found an unexpected substantial parallelism concerning the poetic function between his historical vision and theoretical vision of the famous linguist Roman Jakobson. In the first half of sixties both have dealt with relation between poetry and poetic function. And both explained that poetic procedure, as distinguished from poetry, is a technology of oral language by means of which oral cultures realize mnemonic tools to pass on their tradition. The two scholars, independent of each other, discussed this topic in conceptually close terms and they went so far as to adopt very similar definitions of the phenomenon although inspired by distinctly separated paradigms.

The purpose of this article is to highlight what topics are actually covered in a short passage of the Cours de linguistique générale and to propose a re-writing that allows the correct interpretation of the Saussurean discourse. The passage from the Saussurean text, which we will analyze, seems incomprehensible to me as it lacks an explicit reference to inner speech. Cours handwritten sources, which can be consulted thanks to the work of Robert Godel and Rudolph Engler, confirmed the omission and the persuasion that Saussure in that passage was thinking precisely of the langage intérieur. In fact, although repeatedly quoted in the manuscript sources, this topic is not repeated in the text and this largely misrepresents the meaning of the passage.
In the last part, following the indications of John E. Joseph (2010),  we examine also the Saussurean sources about the inner speech. In particular, the article considers La parole intérieure (1881), work of  French psychologist Victor Egger, which is a wide-ranging book that deals with the theme of inner speech through a long excursus made up of hundreds of pages. The fact that Saussure has read and annotated this work is a relevant clue to presume that inner speech is really a topic of the passage we discussed in this article.