example the history of Latin as traditionally narrated.) For the temporality
of change in a given language is complex and uneven, because the various
elements that make up a language develop at different speeds.
Thus, the vocabulary of a language changes very quickly, year by year,
generation by generation. In his youth my father smoked sibiches[ciggies];
in mine we smoked seiches[butts] and then clops[fags]; I do not know what
today’s adolescents smoke (or I know only too well), but I have heard the
word ‘nuit-grave’, which has the advantage of cutting up and re-semanticising
the deterrent slogan that every packet of cigarettes must carry in France (nuit
gravement à la santé). This shows that linguistic invention is not the preserve
of poets and that we must assume a poetic voice of the people which I have
elsewhere proposed to call the ‘unknown coiner ’.^13 This very rapid change,
which has something to do with the dialects of social groups and generations,
obviously does not involve the vocabulary in its entirety: the spoken changes
more rapidly than the written; the lexicon of a language has a more stable
central component, to designate natural kinds like ‘gold’ or ‘tiger ’, and
everyday objects to the extent that (and as long as) they do not change, like
‘house’. Naturally, we understand that emotive words or argotchange more
quickly than others. But what interests me here are the different speeds of
evolution of the different dialects, registers, jargons, and language games,
which render any synchronic essential section decidedly random.
It will be objected that what evolves so rapidly is the most superficial aspect
of language – its spoken vocabulary – and that the core of the structure – the
syntax and grammatical markers – does not shift. But they definitely do shift,
even if they take rather longer. There is a history of markers, which explains
the complexity and nuances of their contemporary usage. Thus, all Anglicists
are interested in the form ‘be + ing’, mark of the continuous aspect (‘she is
eating’ contrasts with ‘she eats’); and theoretical explanations of the values
of this marker, which are sometimes of a Byzantine complexity, are not wanting.
But this marker also has a history, whose traces are still inscribed in
contemporary English. To arrive at the form ‘she was reading’, where we
simply have a modification of the main verb by a marker of aspect, things
have passed from ‘she was on reading’, where the main verb is in reality a
verbal noun, and ‘she was a-reading’, corruption of the previous form, which
Propositions (1) • 153(^13) See Lecercle 1991.