Ferdinand Mongin de Saussure (; ; 26 November 185722 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century.Robins, R. H. 1979. A Short History of Linguistics, 2nd Edition. Longman Linguistics Library. London and New York. p. 201: Robins writes Saussure's statement of "the structural approach to language underlies virtually the whole of modern linguistics".Harris, R. and T. J. Taylor. 1989. Landmarks in Linguistic Thought: The Western Tradition from Socrates to Saussure. 2nd Edition. Chapter 16. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguisticsJustin Wintle, Makers of modern culture, Routledge, 2002, p. 467.David Lodge, Nigel Wood, Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, Pearson Education, 2008, p. 42.Thomas, Margaret. 2011. Fifty Key Thinkers on Language and Linguistics. Routledge: London and New York. p. 145 ff.Chapman, S. and C. Routledge. 2005. Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language. Edinburgh University Press. p.241 ff. and one of two major founders (together with Charles Sanders Peirce) of semiotics, or semiology, as Saussure called it.Winfried Nöth, Handbook of Semiotics, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990.
One of his translators, Roy Harris, summarized Saussure's contribution to linguistics and the study of "the whole range of human sciences. It is particularly marked in linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology and anthropology."Harris, R. 1988. Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein. Routledge. pix. Although they have undergone extension and critique over time, the dimensions of organization introduced by Saussure continue to inform contemporary approaches to the phenomenon of language. As Leonard Bloomfield stated after reviewing Saussure's work: "he has given us the theoretical basis for a science of human speech".Bloomfield L., Cours de Linguistique Générale by Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, The Modern Language Journal, Feb. 1924, Vol. 8, No. 5 pp. 317-19
Biography Saussure was born in Geneva in 1857. His father, Henri Louis Frédéric de Saussure, was a mineralogist, entomologist, and taxonomist. He showed signs of considerable talent and intellectual ability as early as the age of fourteen.Слюсарева, Наталья Александровна: Некоторые полузабытые страницы из истории языкознания – Ф. де Соссюр и У. Уитней. (Общее и романское языкознание: К 60-летию Р.А. Будагова). Москва 1972. In the autumn of 1870, he began attending the private school called the Institution Martine (previously the Institution Lecoultre until 1969) in Geneva. There he lived with the family of a classmate, Elie David. After graduating at the top of class, Saussure expected to continue his studies at the Gymnase de Genève, but his father decided he was not mature enough at fourteen and a half, and sent him to the Collège de Genève instead. The college also housed the Gymnase de Genève and some of its teachers also taught at the Collège. Saussure, however, was not pleased, as he complained: "I entered the Collège de Genève, to waste a year there as completely as a year can be wasted."
He spent the year studying Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, and attended a variety of courses at the University of Geneva. He also purposely avoided taking the course in general linguistics due to its bad reputation, arranging instead to study foundational works in comparative-historical linguistics with Louis Morel, a Privatdozent. He began graduate work at the University of Leipzig and arrived at the university in October 1876.
Two years later, at 21, Saussure published a book entitled Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (Dissertation on the Primitive Vowel System in Indo-European Languages). After this, he studied for a year at the University of Berlin under the Privatdozent Heinrich Zimmer, with whom he studied Celtic and Hermann Oldenberg with whom he continued his studies of Sanskrit.Joseph (2012:253) He returned to Leipzig to defend his doctoral dissertation De l'emploi du génitif absolu en Sanscrit, and was awarded his doctorate in February 1880. Soon, he relocated to the University of Paris, where he lectured on Sanskrit, Gothic, Old High German, and occasionally other subjects.
Ferdinand de Saussure is one of the world's most quoted linguists, which is remarkable as he hardly published anything during his lifetime. Even his few scientific articles are not unproblematic. Thus, for example, his publication on Lithuanian phoneticsFerdinand de Saussure, ‘Accentuation lituanienne’, Indogermanische Forschungen, vol. 6 (1896): 157–66. is mostly taken from studies by the Lithuanian researcher Friedrich Kurschat, with whom Saussure traveled through Lithuania in August 1880 for two weeks and whose (German) books Saussure had read. Saussure, who had studied some basic grammar of Lithuanian in Leipzig for one semester but was unable to speak the language, was thus dependent on Kurschat.
Saussure taught at the École pratique des hautes études for eleven years during which he was named Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor).Culler (1976:23) When offered a professorship in Geneva in 1892, he returned to Switzerland. Saussure lectured on Sanskrit and Indo-European at the University of Geneva for the remainder of his life. It was not until 1907 that Saussure began teaching the Course of General Linguistics, which he offered three times ending in the summer of 1911. He died in 1913 in Vufflens-le-Château, Vaud, Switzerland. His brothers were the linguist and Esperantist René de Saussure, and scholar of ancient Chinese astronomy, Léopold de Saussure. His son Raymond de Saussure was a psychiatrist and prolific psychoanalytic theorist, who was trained under Sigmund Freud himself.H. Vermorel, 'Raymond de Saussure. First president of the European Psychoanalytical Federation', International Journal of Psychoanalysis 79:1 (February 1998), pp.73–81
Saussure attempted at various times in the 1880s and 1890s, to write a book on general linguistic matters. His lectures about important principles of language description in Geneva between 1907 and 1911 were collected and published by his pupils posthumously in the famous Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics) in 1916. Work published in his lifetime includes two monographs and a few dozen papers and notes, all of them collected in a volume of some 600 pages published in 1922.Recueil des publications scientifiques de F. de Saussure (1922), ed. C. Bally and L. Gautier, Lausanne and Geneva: Payot. Saussure did not publish anything of his work on ancient poetics even though he had filled more than a hundred notebooks. Jean Starobinski edited and presented material from them in the 1970sJean Starobinski, Les mots sous les mots. Les anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure, Paris, Gallimard, 1971, and more has been published since then.Anagrammes homériques, édition Pierre-Yves Testenoire, Limoges, Lambert Lucas, 2013. Some of his manuscripts, including an unfinished essay discovered in 1996, were published in Writings in General Linguistics, but most of the material in it had already been published in Engler's critical edition of the Cours,Rudolf Engler, ed. Cours de linguistique générale, critical edn. 2 vols. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1968/1974 (reprint 1989/1990). in 1967 and 1974. Today it is clear that Cours owes much to its so-called editors Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye and various details are difficult to track to Saussure himself or his manuscripts.Jürgen Trabant, ‘Saussure contre le Cours’, in De l'essence double du langage et le renouveau du saussurisme, ed. François Rastier (Limoges: Lambert-Lucas, 2016).
Work and influence Saussure's theoretical reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European language vocalic system and particularly his theory of laryngeals, otherwise unattested at the time, bore fruit and found confirmation after the decipherment of Hittite in the work of later generations of linguists such as Émile Benveniste and Walter Couvreur, who both drew direct inspiration from their reading of the 1878 Mémoire.E. F. K. Koerner, 'The Place of Saussure's Memoire in the development of historical linguistics,' in Jacek Fisiak (ed.) Papers from the Sixth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, (Poznań, Poland, 1983) John Benjamins Publishing, 1985 pp.323-346, p.339.
Saussure had a major impact on the development of linguistic theory in the first half of the 20th century with his notions becoming incorporated in the central tenets of structural linguistics. His main contributions to structuralism include his notion of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. There is also his theory of a two-tiered reality about language. The first is the langue, the abstract and invisible layer, while the second, the parole, refers to the actual speech that we hear in real life. This framework was later adopted by Claude Levi-Strauss, who used the two-tiered model to determine the reality of myths. His idea was that all myths have an underlying pattern, which forms the structure that makes them myths.
In Europe, the most important work after Saussure's death was done by the Prague school. Most notably, Nikolay Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson headed the efforts of the Prague School in setting the course of phonological theory in the decades from 1940. Jakobson's universalizing structural-functional theory of phonology, based on a markedness hierarchy of distinctive features, was the first successful solution of a plane of linguistic analysis according to the Saussurean hypotheses. Elsewhere, Louis Hjelmslev and the Copenhagen School proposed new interpretations of linguistics from structuralist theoretical frameworks.
In America, where the term structuralism became highly ambiguous, Saussure's ideas informed the distributionalism of Leonard Bloomfield, but his influence remained limited. Systemic functional linguistics is a theory considered to be based firmly on the Saussurean principles of the sign, albeit with some modifications. Ruqaiya Hasan describes systemic functional linguistics as a 'post-Saussurean' linguistic theory. Michael Halliday argues:
Course in General Linguistics
Saussure's most influential work, Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique générale), was published posthumously in 1916 by former students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, based on notes taken from Saussure's lectures in Geneva.Macey, D. (2009). The Penguin dictionary of critical theory. Crane Library at the University of British Columbia. The Course became one of the seminal linguistics works of the 20th century not primarily for the content (many of the ideas had been anticipated in the works of other 20th-century linguists) but for the innovative approach that Saussure applied in discussing linguistic phenomena.
Its central notion is that language may be analyzed as a formal system of differential elements, apart from the messy dialectics of real-time production and comprehension. Examples of these elements include his notion of the linguistic sign, which is composed of the signifier and the signified. Though the sign may also have a referent, Saussure took that to lie beyond the linguist's purview.
Throughout the book, he stated that a linguist can develop a diachronic analysis of a text or theory of language but must learn just as much or more about the language/text as it exists at any moment in time (i.e. "synchronically"): "Language is a system of signs that expresses ideas". A science that studies the life of signs within society and is a part of social and general psychology. Saussure believed that semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign, and he called it semiology.
Laryngeal theory