Saussure Ferdinand de (1857–1913), Swiss linguist and founder of the school of structural linguistics. His work in linguistics was a major influence on the later development of French structuralist philosophy, as well as structural anthropology, structuralist literary criticism, and modern semiology. He pursued studies in linguistics largely under Georg Curtius at the University of Leipzig, along with such future Junggrammatiker (neogrammarians) as Leskien and Brugmann. Following the publication of his important Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européenes (1879), Saussure left for Paris, where he associated himself with the Société Linguistique and taught comparative grammar. In 1891, he returned to Switzerland to teach Sanskrit, comparative grammar, and general linguistics at the University of Geneva. His major work, the Course in General Linguistics (1916), was assembled from students’ notes and his original lecture outlines after his death. The Course in General Linguistics argued against the prevalent historical and comparative philological approaches to language by advancing what Saussure termed a scientific model for linguistics, one borrowed in part from Durkheim. Such a model would take the ‘social fact’ of language (la langue) as its object, and distinguish this from the variety of individual speech events (la parole), as well as from the collectivity of speech events and grammatical rules that form the general historical body of language as such (le langage). Thus, by separating out the unique and accidental elements of practiced speech, Saussure distinguished language (la langue) as the objective set of linguistic elements and rules that, taken as a system, governs the language use specific to a given community. It was the systematic coherency and generality of language, so conceived, that inclined Saussure to approach linguistics principally in terms of its static or synchronic dimension, rather than its historical or diachronic dimension. For Saussure, the system of language is a ‘treasury’ or ‘depository’ of signs, and the basic unit of the linguistic sign is itself two-sided, having both a phonemic component (‘the signifier’) and a semantic component (‘the signified’). He terms the former the ‘acoustical’ or ‘sound’ image – which may, in turn, be represented graphically, in writing – and the latter the ‘concept’ or ‘meaning.’ Saussure construes the signifier to be a representation of linguistic sounds in the imagination or memory, i.e., a ‘psychological phenomenon,’ one that corresponds to a specifiable range of material phonetic sounds. Its distinctive property consists in its being readily differentiated from other signifiers in the particular language. It is the function of each signifier, as a distinct entity, to convey a particular meaning – or ‘signified’ concept – and this is fixed purely by conventional association.
While the relation between the signifier and signified results in what Saussure terms the ‘positive’ fact of the sign, the sign ultimately derives its linguistic value (its precise descriptive determination) from its position in the system of language as a whole, i.e., within the paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations that structurally and functionally differentiate it. Signifiers are differentially identified; signifiers are arbitrarily associated with their respective signified concepts; and signs assume the determination they do only through their configuration within the system of language as a whole: these facts enabled Saussure to claim that language is largely to be understood as a closed formal system of differences, and that the study of language would be principally governed by its autonomous structural determinations.
So conceived, linguistics would be but a part of the study of social sign systems in general, namely, the broader science of what Saussure termed semiology. Saussure’s insights would be taken up by the subsequent Geneva, Prague, and Copenhagen schools of linguistics and by the Russian formalists, and would be further developed by the structuralists in France and elsewhere, as well as by recent semiological approaches to literary criticism, social anthropology, and psychoanalysis.
See also MEANING, PHILOSOPHY OF LAN- GUAGE , STRUCTURALISM , THEORY OF SIGN.
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