Patrick SÉRIOT, Univ. of Lausanne : «Systemic Elements Jumping across the Limits between Systems» If language is «a system where everything is linked», the elements of the system can exist only inside the system. As their existence is only oppositive, they cannot materialize to jumping across the limits of the system. It is therefore interesting that in the 1920' and 1930' two founders of phonology, R. Jakobson and N. Trubetzkoy, constantly strove to bring to the fore such «phonological unions

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... f languages», where intrasystemic characteristics link several languages, which are not cognate, but geographically neighbouring. The main point of this paper is that this lag between systemic principles and the claim that systemic characteristics can materialize to such an extent that they can pass from one system to another, can he understood only by reference to philosophical and epistemological problems, which include the biological conceptions of this period, the common ideological («eurasianist») conceptions in the Russian emigration, and, finally, the reception of romantic scientific theories (Naturphilosophie) in the Russian culture.