Koerner, Saussure, Chomsky: an eternal upbraiding of the ‘Great Man theory’ ¹

Starting with his 1971 PhD dissertation, which although centred on Saussure covered the entire history of linguistic thought, E. F. K. Koerner opposed claims that Saussure or any other single linguist ever made a complete break with what had gone before. At the time, such claims – reflecting the ‘Great Man theory of history’ – were being made about Chomskyan generativism, and the dissertation was aimed as much at proving Saussure’s continuity forwards to Chomsky as backwards to his own linguistic predecessors. Koerner’s overall project can be described as, first, to show that linguistics has always been a social enterprise in the sense of evolving through the interplay of ideas; and secondly, to ensure that the history of linguistics have the social meeting grounds, in print and in person, required for it to develop and prosper.