Historiographia Linguistica - Online First

Though originally conceived as an American dialect dictionary, on the model of the English Dialect Dictionary, the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) is significantly different from its predecessors, as well as theoretically and technically distinct from the dictionary the American Dialect Society thought its members would compile. DARE marks the transition from traditional dialectology to a more fluid approach to documenting and mapping variation in the second half of the twentieth century. Frederic G. Cassidy, who planned DARE and was its original chief editor, began to doubt the usefulness of the concept dialect in the 1940s, preferring to think of variation as regional, as reflected in the dictionary’s title. Regional variation resists isoglosses and reified dialect areas and instead distributes usage differently word by word, wherever the evidence leads, outliers and all. Cassidy’s innovations represent reactions both to his reading of William Dwight Whitney on dialect and to treatment of dialect in Leonard Bloomfield’s Language (1933). Cassidy’s new way of analyzing and representing variation converged with those developed in American sociolinguistics of the same period.

In the second half of the 20th century a linguistic approach emerged that aimed to complement the analysis of language structure: énonciation, centred on speakers and the act of speaking. Émile Benveniste has had his role raised to author of the theory, despite its developing simultaneously in work by Roman Jakobson and Jacques Lacan, and later Tzvetan Todorov, with each of whom he had professional and personal ties. Others who figure in its formulation are J. L. Austin, Charles Bally, Leonard Bloomfield, Jacques Damourette and Édouard Pichon, Bronisɬaw Malinowski, Hendrik Pos and, to some extent, Karl Bühler. Of particular significance is work published in 1969 by Jean Dubois and Michel Foucault, both of whom give enunciation a clearer and fuller treatment than is found in the 1970 paper by Benveniste regarded as the locus classicus. The present article argues for, not sidelining Benveniste, but approaching the invention of enunciation as dialogic – a case of distributed cognition – instead of treating it on the lines of the ‘Great Man theory of history’ which this journal’s founder, E. F. K. Koerner, worked hard to oppose.