French linguist Emile Benveniste's Indo-European Language and Society (1969)
reconstructs "a shifting social context around a given term, debt, healing or fathering for example"
with an eye for "minute irregularities [or] transformations" and "obscured or suppressed divergencies and correspondences" (Robertson's phrasing)
a sort of "precursor to post-structuralism"
Robertson 79: "Siring, giving, hosting, buying, hiring, marrying, swearing by oath, measuring, suplicating and healing are subjected to profound lexical diachronic analyses, revealing how the emergence of new ideas and cultural and social practices requires that specialized applications are supported by changing institutional structures"
"Benveniste's linguistic filedwork makes possible a freshened, altered perception of those specialized, but seemingly transparent, concentps that continue to condition our collective experience"
"Beneveniste placed language, in its profoundly social and collective dimensions, at the fundament of human experience"