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Foreword
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1Dear colleagues,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear Luigi Rizzi,
2I am delighted to welcome you this evening to the Inaugural Lecture of the Chair of General Linguistics which, unfortunately, is taking place the day after the death of Jacques Glowinski, Professor Emeritus and Honorary Administrator, who passed away yesterday afternoon. Without Jacques Glowinski, the Collège de France as we know it today would not exist; all his colleagues have emphasized his humanity, his openness, and his unfailing dedication to our institution. But I also know that Jacques Glowinski would have wanted the intellectual and scientific life of the Collège de France to continue, even in difficult times, and particularly with the welcoming of new colleagues, an event that we are celebrating this evening.
3During the first lockdown, which began in March, we tried to reorganize events at the Collège de France by postponing the Inaugural Lectures planned for the spring, in the hope that by the beginning of the new academic year, the COVID-19 pandemic would be something of the past. Unfortunately, this was a vain hope, and we are currently facing a second wave which is imposing severe restrictions and, among other things, the closure of our institution to the public.
4We therefore decided to maintain the courses and Inaugural Lecture via digital technologies. This evening, for the first time in the history of the Collège de France, you will be able to watch an Inaugural Lecture, that of our colleague Luigi Rizzi, Chair of General Linguistics, live via internet. I have the honour and pleasure of introducing him briefly before handing him the floor.
5The study of languages and their comparison has a long tradition at the Collège de France. In the early twentieth century, this interest in languages led to the establishment of Scientific Linguistics which has had its place at the Collège de France since then, as the Chairs of Antoine Meillet, Émile Benveniste and Claude Hagège, among others, have shown.
6There are many ways of conceiving of linguistics as a discipline, but all approaches share the same fascination with languages, their diversity and the possible relations between them. Is it language or languages that distinguish us from primates? Can we reconstruct a primeval language from which all others derive?
7The dream of a single language obviously brings to mind the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis. According to this story, humanity was originally united and spoke only one language. Man then decided to implement a large-scale technological project to build a city with a tower reaching up to the sky. The idea of getting closer to the sky strongly displeased the deity, who decided to scramble their language so that they would no longer understand one another. Unable to communicate, they stopped building the city and the tower. According to this account, the diversity of languages is the consequence of divine sanction. According to another biblical account – which, curiously, is situated just before that of the Tower of Babel –, the diversity of languages occurred automatically. It was related to Noah’s three sons’ and their descendants’ settling in different regions of the Earth after the Flood. Each people then automatically spoke a different language.
8What if the two stories were not so far apart? Can the diversity of languages be understood, as Luigi Rizzi argues, as variations on the same theme?
9Luigi Rizzi was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sienna and at the University of Geneva. He has taught at several universities in Europe and the US, and is the author of about two hundred articles and four books. He was the recipient of European Research Council (ERC) funding for the project Syntactic Cartography and Locality in Adult Grammar and Language Acquisition. His research has led to a better understanding of invariance and variation across languages, locality theory, and the mapping of syntactic structures and language acquisition.
10Luigi Rizzi is one of the main architects of the “principles and parameters” theoretical framework, which conceives of linguistic variation as being determined by a set of binary choices, “parameters”, within an otherwise invariant grammatical system.
11He first developed the concept of ‘locality’. This is the idea that, although syntactic representations are potentially unlimited, the core of syntactic processing is ‘local’ and can be applied only to a limited portion of the syntactic structure.
12Another central theme of Luigi Rizzi’s work is the mapping of syntactic structures, an undertaking that has had a significant impact on comparative linguistics. This syntactic description has made it possible to analyse and compare languages that are far apart, including sign language.
13Finally, Luigi Rizzi’s work has furthered our understanding of language acquisition by introducing fundamental hypotheses about children’s linguistic representations. He has shown that children’s apparent grammatical errors actually reflect a syntactic pattern of the same structure as that of adults.
14The title of the Chair that Luigi Rizzi is inaugurating this evening, General Linguistics, shows that his work offers a synthesis of several intellectual traditions within linguistics, notably between linguistic typology and discourse theory.
15Dear Luigi Rizzi, you are a linguist who masters the whole panoply of the world’s languages, your work has a very broad scope, and you are able to engage in a productive dialogue with many disciplines. Your place is therefore here at the Collège de France. We welcome you warmly and look forward to hearing you speak.
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Complexity of Linguistic Structures, Simplicity of Language Mechanisms
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