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Ferdinand de Saussure (November 26, 1857 – February 22, 1913) was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid the foundation for many of the significant developments in linguistics in the twentieth century. He is widely considered the "father" of twentieth-century linguistics, and his work laid the foundation for the approach known as structuralism in the broader field of the social sciences. Although his work established the essential framework of future studies, his ideas contained many limitations and fundamental weaknesses as later scholars recognized that underlying structure and rules, while informative, can not be the sole determinant of meaning and value in any social system.

Biography

Born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1857, Ferdinand de Saussure was interested in languages early in his life. By age 15, he had learned Greek, French, German, English, and Latin, and at that age he also wrote an essay on languages. Coming from a family of scientists, he began his education at the University of Geneva studying the natural sciences. He was there a year, and then convinced his parents to allow him to go to Leipzig in 1876 to study linguistics.

Two years later at the age of 21, Saussure studied for a year in Berlin, where he wrote his only full-length work titled Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européenes.He returned to Leipzig and was awarded his doctorate in 1880. Soon afterwards he relocated to Paris, where he would lecture on ancient and modern languages for eleven years before returning to Geneva in 1891.

Living in Geneva, teaching Sanskrit and historical linguistics, he married there and had two sons. Saussure continued to lecture at the university for the remainder of his life. However, it was not until 1906 that Saussure began teaching the course of "General Linguistics" that would consume the greater part of his attention until his death in 1913.

Legacy

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 on the basis of 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 rather 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, and possibly has a referent, though Saussure took this last question to lie beyond the linguist's purview.Saussure attempted at various times in the 1880s and 1890s to write a book on general linguistic matters. Some of his manuscripts, including an unfinished essay discovered in 1996, were published in Writings in General Linguistics ,though most of the material in this book had already been published in Engler's critical edition of the Course in 1967and 1974. (TUFA)

Laryngeal theory

While a student, Saussure published an important work in Indo-European philology that proposed the existence of ghosts in Proto-Indo-European called

sonant coefficients. The Scandinavian scholar Hermann Möller suggested that these might actually be laryngeal consonants, leading to what is now known as the laryngeal theory. It has been argued that the problem Saussure encountered, of trying to explain how he was able to make systematic and predictive hypotheses from known linguistic data to unknown linguistic data, stimulated his development of structuralism. Saussure's predictions about the existence of primate coefficients/laryngeals and their evolution proved a resounding success when the Hittite texts were discovered and deciphered, some 50 years later.Saussure's ideas had a major impact on the development of linguistic theory in the first half of the 20th century. Two currents of thought emerged independently of each other, one in Europe, the other in America. The results of each incorporated the basic notions of Saussurian thought in forming the central tenets of structural linguistics.Saussure posited that linguistic form is arbitrary, and therefore all languages function in a similar fashion. According to Saussure, a language is arbitrary because it is systematic in that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Also,all languages have their own concepts and sound images (or signifieds and signifiers). Therefore, Saussure argues that languages have a relational conception of their elements: words and their meanings are defined by comparing and contrasting their meanings to one another. For instance, the sound images for and the conception of a book differ from the sound images for and the conception of a table. Languages are also arbitrary because of the nature of their linguistic elements; they are defined in terms of their function rather than in terms of their inherent qualities. Finally,language has a social nature in that it provides a larger context for analysis, determination, and realization of its structure.In Europe, the most important work in this period 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 following 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.

Later developments

In America, Saussure's ideas informed the distributionalism of Leonard Bloomfield and the post-Bloomfield anstructuralism of those scholars guided by and furthering the practices established in Bloomfield's investigations and analyses of language, such as Eugene Nida, Bernard Bloch, George L. Trager, Rulon S. Wells III, Charles Hockett,and through Zellig Harris, the young Noam Chomsky. In addition to Chomsky's theory of Transformational grammar, other contemporary developments of structuralism include Kenneth Pike's theory of tagmemics, SidneyLamb's theory of stratificational grammar, and Michael Silverstein's work.By the latter half of the 20th century, many of Saussure's ideas were under heavy criticism. His linguistic ideas arenow generally considered important in their time, but outdated and superseded by developments such as cognitive linguistics. In 1972, Noam Chomsky described Saussurean linguists as an "impoverished and thoroughly in adequate conception of language,"while in 1984, Marcus Mitchell declared that Saussurean linguistics were"fundamentally inadequate to process the full range of natural language [and furthermore were] held by no current researchers, to my knowledge."

In particular, linguistics have shifted from Saussure's focus on single words to analysis of sentences. Holland notes that up to the 1950s Saussure enjoyed some legitimacy in linguistics, but with the cognitive revolution which began in 1957, Chomsky had:decisively refuted Saussure. [...] Much of Chomsky's work is not accepted by other linguists [and] I am not asking you to accept Chomsky's own linguistics, however. My point is simply that Chomsky's work rendered Saussure's linguistics, indeed much of post-Saussurean linguistics, obsolete. I am not claiming that Chomsky is right, only that Chomsky has proven that Saussure is wrong. Linguists who reject Chomsky claim to be goingbeyond Chomsky, or they cling to phrase-structure grammars. They are not turning back to Saussure.

Semiotics

Saussure is one of the founding fathers of semiotics. His concept of the sign/signifier/signified/referent forms the core of the field.

Influence outside linguistics

The principles and methods employed by structuralism were soon adopted by scholars and literary thinkers, such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and implemented in their areas of study (literary studies/philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology respectively). However, their expansive interpretations of Saussure's theories, which contained ambiguities to begin with, and their application of those theories tonon-linguistic fields of study such as sociology or anthropology, led to theoretical difficulties and proclamations of the end of structuralism in those disciplines.Saussure is the subject of The Magnetic Fields’song "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure" on their 1999 album 69Love Songs.

Quotations

•"A sign is the basic unit of language (a given language at a given time). Every language is a complete system of signs. Parole (the speech of an individual) is an external manifestation of language."

•"A linguistic system is a series of differences of sounds combined with a series of differences of ideas."

•"The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary."

•"In language there are only differences, and no positive terms"

Works

1. Saussure, Ferdinand de. (2002) Écrits de linguistique générale(edition prepared by Simon Bouquet and Rudolf Engler), Paris: Gallimard. ISBN 2-07-076116-9. English translation:Writings in General Linguistics, Oxford:Oxford University Press. (2006) ISBN 0-19-926144-X.

• This volume, which consists mostly of material previously published by Engler, includes an attempt atreconstructing 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'scritical edition of the Course and from another unfinished book manuscript of Saussure's, published in 1995 byMaria Pia Marchese (Phonétique: Il manoscritto di Harvard Houghton Library bMS Fr 266 (8), Padova:Unipress, 1995).

1. (1878) Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européenes( Memoir on the Primitive System of Vowels in Indo-European Languages), Leipzig: Teubner. (online version in Gallica Program,Bibliothèque nationale de France).

2. (1916)Cours de linguistique générale, ed. C. Bally and A. Sechehaye, with the collaboration of A. Riedlinger,Lausanne and Paris: Payot; trans. W. Baskin,Course in General Linguistics, Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977.

3. (1922) Recueil des publications scientifiques de F. de Saussure, ed. C. Bally and L. Gautier, Lausanne andGeneva: Payot.

4. (1993)Saussure’ s Third Course of Lectures in General Linguistics (1910– 1911): Emile Constantin ders notlarından, Language and Communication series, volume. 12, trans. and ed. E. Komatsu and R. Harris, Oxford:Pergamon.

References

1. Соссюр Ф. де. Труды по языкознанию. М., 1977.

2. Соссюр Ф. де. Заметки по общей лингвистике. М.: Прогресс, 1990; 2001.

3. Соссюр Фердинанд де. Курс общей лингвистики. Пер. с французского А. М. Сухотина, под редакцией и с примечаниями Р. И. Шор. М.: Едиториал УРСС, 2004. — 256 с. (Лингвистическое наследие XX века) — ISBN 5-354-00556-6

4. Веселинов, Д. Българските студенти на Фердинанд дьо Сосюр. София: СИЕЛА, 2008. 400 с.

5. www.newworldencyclopedia.org

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