# ferdinand de saussure ![[ferdinanddesaussurebyjullienrestored.png]] born: 26 november 1857 geneva switzerland died: 22 february 1913 (aged 55) vufflens-le-château vaud switzerland education education: university of geneva - leipzig university (phd 1880) - university of berlin philosophical work era: 19th-century philosophy region: western philosophy school: structuralism linguistic turn semiotics institutions: ephe - university of geneva main interests: linguistics notable ideas: structural linguistics - semiology - langue and parole - signified and signifier - diachrony and synchrony - linguistic sign - semiotic arbitrariness - laryngeal theory signature ![[ferdinanddesaussuresignature.svg.png]] ferdinand de saussure (; french: ; 26 november 1857 - 22 february 1913) was a swiss linguist semiotician and philosopher. ir ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. ey is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders (together with charles sanders peirce) of semiotics or semiology as saussure called it one of ir translators roy harris summarised 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." although they have undergone extension and critique over time the dimensions of organisation introduced by saussure continue to inform contemporary approaches to the phenomenon of language. as leonard bloomfield stated after reviewing saussure's work: "ey has given us the theoretical basis for a science of human speech" saussure was born in geneva in 1857. ir father henri louis frederic de saussure was a mineralogist entomologist and taxonomist. saussure showed signs of considerable talent and intellectual ability as early as the age of fourteen. in the autumn of 1870 ey began attending the private school called the institution martine (previously the institution lecoultre until 1969) in geneva. there ey lived with the family of a classmate elie david. after graduating at the top of class saussure expected to continue ir studies at the gymnase de genève but ir father decided ey was not mature enough at fourteen and a half and sent ir 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 ey complained: "i entered the collège de genève to waste a year there as completely as a year can be wasted" ey spent the year studying latin ancient greek and sanskrit and taking a variety of courses at the university of geneva. ey 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. ey commenced 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 memoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-europeennes (dissertation on the primitive vowel system in indo-european languages.) after this ey studied for a year at the university of berlin under the privatdozent heinrich zimmer with whom ey studied celtic and hermann oldenberg with whom ey continued ir studies of sanskrit. ey returned to leipzig to defend ir doctoral dissertation de l'emploi du genitif absolu en sanscrit and was awarded ir doctorate in february 1880. soon ey relocated to the university of paris where ey 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 ey hardly published anything during ir lifetime. even ir few scientific articles are not unproblematic. thus for example ir publication on lithuanian phonetics 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 ecole pratique des hautes etudes for eleven years during which ey was named chevalier de la legion d'honneur (knight of the legion of honor.) when offered a professorship in geneva in 1892 ey returned to switzerland. saussure lectured on sanskrit and indo-european at the university of geneva for the remainder of ir life. it was not until 1907 that saussure began teaching the course of general linguistics which ey would offer three times ending in the summer of 1911. ey died in 1913 in vufflens-le-château vaud switzerland. ir brothers were the linguist and esperantist rene de saussure and scholar of ancient chinese astronomy leopold de saussure. ir son raymond de saussure was a psychiatrist and prolific psychoanalytic theorist who was trained under sigmund freud himself saussure attempted at various times in the 1880s and 1890s to write a book on general linguistic matters. ir lectures about important principles of language description in geneva between 1907 and 1911 were collected and published by ir pupils posthumously in the famous cours de linguistique generale (course in general linguistics) in 1916. work published in ir 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. saussure did not publish anything of ir work on ancient poetics even though ey had filled more than a hundred notebooks. jean starobinski edited and presented material from them in the 1970s and more has been published since then. some of ir 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 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 ir manuscripts saussure's theoretical reconstructions of the proto-indo-european language vocalic system and particularly ir 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 emile benveniste and walter couvreur who both drew direct inspiration from ir reading of the 1878 memoire saussure had a major impact on the development of linguistic theory in the first half of the 20th century with ir notions becoming incorporated in the central tenets of structural linguistics. ir main contributions to structuralism include ir notion of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. there is also ir 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. ir 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 ir 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 > saussure took the sign as the organizing concept for linguistic structure using it to express the conventional nature of language in the phrase "l'arbitraire du signe." this has the effect of highlighting what is in fact the one point of arbitrariness in the system namely the phonological shape of words and hence allows the non-arbitrariness of the rest to emerge with greater clarity. an example of something that is distinctly non-arbitrary is the way different kinds of meaning in language are expressed by different kinds of grammatical structure as appears when linguistic structure is interpreted in functional terms # # course in general linguistics saussure's most influential work course in general linguistics (cours de linguistique generale) was published posthumously in 1916 by former students charles bally and albert sechehaye based on notes taken from saussure's lectures in geneva. 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 ir 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 ey 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 (ie "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 ey called it semiology while a student saussure published an important work about proto-indo-european which explained unusual forms of word roots in terms of lost phonemes ey called sonant coefficients. the scandinavian scholar hermann möller suggested that they might be laryngeal consonants leading to what is now known as the laryngeal theory. after hittite texts were discovered and deciphered polish linguist jerzy kuryłowicz recognised that a hittite consonant stood in the positions where saussure had theorised a lost phoneme some 48 years earlier confirming the theory. it has been argued that saussure's work on this problem systematizing the irregular word forms by hypothesizing then-unknown phonemes stimulated ir development of structuralism # # influence outside linguistics the principles and methods employed by structuralism were later adapted in diverse fields by french intellectuals such as roland barthes jacques lacan jacques derrida michel foucault and claude levi-strauss. such scholars took influence from saussure's ideas in ir areas of study (literary studies/philosophy psychoanalysis anthropology etc) saussure approaches the theory of language from two different perspectives. on the one hand language is a system of signs. that is a semiotic system; or a semiological system as ey calls it. on the other hand a language is also a social phenomenon: a product of the language community # # language as semiology one of saussure's key contributions to semiotics lies in what ey called semiology the concept of the bilateral (two-sided) sign which consists of 'the signifier' (a linguistic form eg a word) and 'the signified' (the meaning of the form.) saussure supported the argument for the arbitrariness of the sign although ey did not deny the fact that some words are onomatopoeic or claim that picture-like symbols are fully arbitrary. saussure also did not consider the linguistic sign as random but as historically cemented. all in all ey did not invent the philosophy of arbitrariness but made a very influential contribution to it the arbitrariness of words of different languages itself is a fundamental concept in western thinking of language dating back to ancient greek philosophers. the question of whether words are natural or arbitrary (and artificially made by people) returned as a controversial topic during the age of enlightenment when the medieval scholastic dogma that languages were created by god became opposed by the advocates of humanistic philosophy. there were efforts to construct a 'universal language' based on the lost adamic language with various attempts to uncover universal words or characters which would be readily understood by all people regardless of ir nationality. john locke on the other hand was among those who believed that languages were a rational human innovation and argued for the arbitrariness of words saussure took it for granted in ir time that "no one disputes the principle of the arbitrary nature of the sign." ey however disagreed with the common notion that each word corresponds "to the thing that it names" or what is called the referent in modern semiotics. for example in saussure's notion the word 'tree' does not refer to a tree as a physical object but to the psychological concept of a tree. the linguistic sign thus arises from the psychological association between the signifier (a 'sound-image') and the signified (a 'concept'.) there can therefore be no linguistic expression without meaning but also no meaning without linguistic expression. saussure's structuralism as it later became called therefore includes an implication of linguistic relativity. however saussure's view has been described instead as a form of semantic holism that acknowledged that the interconnection between terms in a language was not fully arbitrary and only methodologically bracketed the relationship between linguistic terms and the physical world the naming of spectral colours exemplifies how meaning and expression arise simultaneously from ir interlinkage. different colour frequencies are per se meaningless or mere substance or meaning potential. likewise phonemic combinations that are not associated with any content are only meaningless expression potential and therefore not considered as signs. it is only when a region of the spectrum is outlined and given an arbitrary name for example 'blue' that the sign emerges. the sign consists of the signifier ('blue') and the signified (the colour region) and of the associative link which connects them. arising from an arbitrary demarcation of meaning potential the signified is not a property of the physical world. in saussure's concept language is ultimately not a function of reality but a self-contained system. thus saussure's semiology entails a bilateral (two-sided) perspective of semiotics the same idea is applied to any concept. for example natural law does not dictate which plants are 'trees' and which are 'shrubs' or a different type of woody plant; or whether these should be divided into further groups. like blue all signs gain semantic value in opposition to other signs of the system (eg red colourless.) if more signs emerge (eg 'marine blue') the semantic field of the original word may narrow down. conversely words may become antiquated whereby competition for the semantic field lessens. or the meaning of a word may change altogether after ir death structural and functional linguists applied saussure's concept to the analysis of the linguistic form as motivated by meaning. the opposite direction of the linguistic expressions as giving rise to the conceptual system on the other hand became the foundation of the post-second world war structuralists who adopted saussure's concept of structural linguistics as the model for all human sciences as the study of how language shapes our concepts of the world. thus saussure's model became important not only for linguistics but for humanities and social sciences as a whole a second key contribution comes from saussure's notion of the organisation of language based on the principle of opposition. saussure made a distinction between meaning (significance) and value. on the semantic side concepts gain value by being contrasted with related concepts creating a conceptual system that could in modern terms be described as a semantic network. on the level of the sound-image phonemes and morphemes gain value by being contrasted with related phonemes and morphemes; and on the level of the grammar parts of speech gain value by being contrasted with each other. each element within each system is eventually contrasted with all other elements in different types of relations so that no two elements have the same value "within the same language all words used to express related ideas limit each other reciprocally; synonyms like french redouter 'dread' craindre 'fear-' and avoir peur 'be afraid' have value only through ir opposition: if redouter did not exist all its content would go to its competitors" saussure defined ir theory in terms of binary oppositions: sign - signified meaning - value language - speech synchronic - diachronic internal linguistics - external linguistics and so on. the related term markedness denotes the assessment of value between binary oppositions. these were studied extensively by post-war structuralists such as claude levi-strauss to explain the organisation of social conceptualisation and later by the post-structuralists to criticise it. cognitive semantics also diverges from saussure on this point emphasizing the importance of similarity in defining categories in the mind as well as opposition based on markedness theory the prague linguistic circle made great advances in the study of phonetics reforming it as the systemic study of phonology. although the terms opposition and markedness are rightly associated with saussure's concept of language as a semiological system ey did not invent the terms and concepts that had been discussed by various 19th-century grammarians before ir in ir treatment of language as a 'social fact' saussure touches on topics that were controversial in ir time and that would continue to split opinions in the post-war structuralist movement. saussure's relationship with 19th-century theories of language was somewhat ambivalent. these included social darwinism and völkerpsychologie or volksgeist thinking which were regarded by many intellectuals as nationalist and racist pseudoscience saussure however considered the ideas useful if treated properly. instead of discarding august schleicher's organicism or heymann steinthal's "spirit of the nation" ey restricted ir sphere in ways that were meant to preclude any chauvinistic interpretations saussure exploited the sociobiological concept of language as a living organism. ey criticises august schleicher and max müller's ideas of languages as organisms struggling for living space but settles with promoting the idea of linguistics as a natural science as long as the study of the 'organism' of language excludes its adaptation to its territory. this concept would be modified in post-saussurean linguistics by the prague circle linguists roman jakobson and nikolai trubetzkoy and eventually diminished perhaps the most famous of saussure's ideas is the distinction between language and speech (fr. langue et parole) with 'speech' referring to the individual occurrences of language usage. these constitute two parts of three of saussure's 'speech circuit' (circuit de parole.) the third part is the brain that is the mind of the individual member of the language community. this idea is in principle borrowed from steinthal so saussure's concept of a language as a social fact corresponds to "volksgeist" although ey was careful to preclude any nationalistic interpretations. in saussure's and durkheim's thinking social facts and norms do not elevate the individuals but shackle them. saussure's definition of language is statistical rather than idealised "among all the individuals that are linked together by speech some sort of average will be set up : all will reproduce - not exactly of course but approximately - the same signs united with the same concepts" saussure argues that language is a 'social fact'; a conventionalised set of rules or norms relating to speech. when at least two people are engaged in conversation there forms a communicative circuit between the minds of the individual speakers. saussure explains that language as a social system is neither situated in speech nor the mind. it only properly exists between the two within the loop. it is located in - and is the product of - the collective mind of the linguistic group. an individual has to learn the normative rules of language and can never control them the task of the linguist is to study the language by analysing samples of speech. for practical reasons this is ordinarily the analysis of written texts. the idea that language is studied through texts is by no means revolutionary as it had been the common practice since the beginning of linguistics. saussure does not advise against introspection and takes up many linguistic examples without reference to a source in a text corpus. the idea that linguistics is not the study of the mind however contradicts wilhelm wundt's völkerpsychologie in saussure's contemporary context; and in a later context generative grammar and cognitive linguistics # a legacy of ideological disputes # # structuralism versus generative grammar saussure's influence was restricted to american linguistics which was dominated by the advocates of wilhelm wundt's psychological approach to language especially leonard bloomfield (1887-1949.) the bloomfieldian school rejected saussure's and other structuralists' sociological or even anti-psychological (eg louis hjelmslev lucien tesnière) approaches to the theory of language. problematically the post-bloomfieldian school was nicknamed 'american structuralism'. although bloomfield denounced wundt's völkerpsychologie and opted for behavioral psychology in ir 1933 textbook language ey and other american linguists stuck to wundt's practice of analysing the grammatical object as part of the verb phrase. since this practice is not semantically motivated they argued for the disconnectedness of syntax from semantics thus fully rejecting structuralism the question remained why the object should be in the verb phrase vexing american linguists for decades. the post-bloomfieldian approach was eventually reformed as a sociobiological framework by noam chomsky who argued that linguistics is a cognitive science; and claimed that linguistic structures are the manifestation of a random mutation in the human genome. advocates of the new school generative grammar claim that saussure's structuralism has been reformed and replaced by chomsky's modern approach to linguistics. jan koster asserts it is certainly the case that saussure considered the most important linguist of the century in europe until the 1950s hardly plays a role in current theoretical thinking about language. as a result of the chomskyan revolution linguistics has gone through a number of conceptual transformations which have led to all kinds of technical pre-occupations that are far beyond linguistic practice of the days of saussure. for the most it seems saussure has rightly sunk into near oblivion french historian and philosopher françois dosse however argues that there have been various misunderstandings. ey points out that chomsky's criticism of 'structuralism' is directed at the bloomfieldian school and not the proper address of the term; and that structural linguistics is not to be reduced to mere sentence analysis. it is also argued that "'chomsky the saussurean' is nothing but "an academic fable." this fable is a result of misreading - by chomsky himself (1964) and also by others - of saussure's la langue (in the singular form) as generativist concept of 'competence' and therefore its grammar as the universal grammar (ug)" saussure's course in general linguistics begins and ends with a criticism of 19th-century linguistics where ey is especially critical of volkgeist thinking and the evolutionary linguistics of august schleicher and ir colleagues. saussure's ideas replaced social darwinism in europe as it was banished from humanities at the end of world war ii the publication of richard dawkins's memetics in 1976 brought the darwinian idea of linguistic units as cultural replicators back to vogue. it became necessary for adherents of this movement to redefine linguistics in a way that would be simultaneously anti-saussurean and anti-chomskyan. this led to a redefinition of old humanistic terms such as structuralism formalism functionalism and constructionism along darwinian lines through debates that were marked by an acrimonious tone. in a functionalism-formalism debate of the decades following the selfish gene the 'functionalism' camp attacking saussure's legacy includes frameworks such as cognitive linguistics construction grammar usage-based linguistics and emergent linguistics. arguing for 'functional-typological theory' william croft criticises saussure's use of the organic analogy when comparing functional-typological theory to biological theory one must take care to avoid a caricature of the latter. in particular in comparing the structure of language to an ecosystem one must not assume that in contemporary biological theory it is believed that an organism possesses a perfect adaptation to a stable niche inside an ecosystem in equilibrium. the analogy of a language as a perfectly adapted 'organic' system where tout se tient is a characteristic of the structuralist approach and was prominent in early structuralist writing. the static view of adaptation in biology is not tenable in the face of empirical evidence of nonadaptive variation and competing adaptive motivations of organisms structural linguist henning andersen disagrees with croft. ey criticises memetics and other models of cultural evolution and points out that the concept of 'adaptation' is not to be taken in linguistics in the same meaning as in biology. humanistic and structuralistic notions are likewise defended by esa itkonen and jacques françois; the saussurean standpoint is explained and defended by tomáš hoskovec representing the prague linguistic circle conversely other cognitive linguists claim to continue and expand saussure's work on the bilateral sign. dutch philologist elise elffers however argues that ir view of the subject is incompatible with saussure's ideas the term 'structuralism' continues to be used in structural-functional linguistics which despite the contrary claims defines itself as a humanistic approach to language **+** (1878) memoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-europeennes. leipzig: teubner. (online version in gallica program bibliothèque nationale de france) **+** (1881) de l'emploi du genitif absolu en sanscrit: thèse pour le doctorat presentee à la faculte de philosophie de l'universite de leipzig. geneva: jules-guillaume fick. (online version on the internet archive) **+** (1916) cours de linguistique generale eds. charles bally & albert sechehaye with the assistance of albert riedlinger. lausanne - paris: payot - 1st trans.: wade baskin trans. course in general linguistics. new york: the philosophical society 1959; subsequently edited by perry meisel & haun saussy ny: columbia university press 2011 - 2nd trans.: roy harris trans. course in general linguistics. la salle ill.: open court 1983 **+** (1922) recueil des publications scientifiques de f. de saussure. eds. charles bally & leopold gautier. lausanne - geneva: payot **+** (1993) saussure's third course of lectures in general linguistics (1910-1911) from the notebooks of emile constantin. (language and communication series vol. 12.) french text edited by eisuke komatsu & trans. by roy harris. oxford: pergamon press **+** (1995) phonetique: il manoscritto di harvard houghton library bms fr 266 (8.) ed. maria pia marchese. padova: unipress 1995 **+** (2002) ecrits de linguistique generale. eds. simon bouquet & rudolf engler. paris: gallimard. 16-6 - trans.: carol sanders & matthew pires trans. writings in general linguistics. ny: oxford university press 2006 - this volume which consists mostly of material previously published by rudolf engler includes an attempt at reconstructing a text from a set of saussure's manuscript pages headed "the double essence of language" found in 1996 in geneva. these pages contain ideas already familiar to saussure scholars both from engler's critical edition of the course and from another unfinished book manuscript of saussure's published in 1995 by maria pia marchese **+** (2013) anagrammes homeriques. ed. pierre-yves testenoire. limoges: lambert lucas **+** (2014) une vie en lettres 1866 - 1913. ed. claudia mejía quijano. ed. nouvelles cecile defaut **+** theory of language **+** geneva school **+** jan baudouin de courtenay **+** culler j. (1976.) saussure. glasgow: fontana/collins **+** ducrot o. & t. todorov (1981.) encyclopedic dictionary of the sciences of language trans. c. porter. oxford: blackwell **+** harris r. (1987.) reading saussure. london: duckworth **+** holdcroft d. (1991.) saussure: signs system and arbitrariness. cambridge university press **+** joseph j. e. (2012.) saussure. oxford university press **+** sanders carol (2004.) the cambridge companion to saussure. cambridge university press. 86-8 **+** velmezova е. & e. fadda eds. (2022.) ferdinand de saussure today: semiotics history epistemology (sign systems studies 50 1.) tartu: tartu university press **+** veselinov dimitur (2008.) българските студенти на фердинанд дьо сосюр (= the bulgarian students of ferdinand de saussure.) sofia: университетско издателство "св. климент охридски" (sofia university press) **+** wittmann henri (1974.) "new tools for the study of saussure's contribution to linguistic thought" historiographia linguistica 1: 255-64 **+** publications by and about ferdinand de saussure in the catalogue helveticat of the swiss national library **+** the poet who could smell vowels: an article in the times literary supplement by john e. joseph 14 november 2007 **+** original texts and resources published by texto issn 1773-0120 (in french) **+** hearing heidegger and saussure by elmer g. wines **+** cercle ferdinand de saussure swiss society devoted to saussurean studies // republic of bob