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Ferdinand Mongin de Saussure (26 November 1857 – 22 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. He 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.
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. ] 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.
Structuralism
Till Saussure, the study of language was a diachronic practice, which is to say language was
studied by analyzing the changes that have been taking place in the language through history.
Saussure introduced a synchronic approach to study the language.
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A synchronic approach would mean to consider language as a structure and to study it in
its entirety at a given point of time. Saussure contributed ideas and theories to the world of
linguistics that theorists like Levi Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Julia
Kristeva, etc. were under the influence of his insights.
Saussure was born in a Swiss family, studied at universities of Berlin and Leipzig. He taught in
Paris, and later at the University of Geneva. His Course in General Linguistics in fact was a
posthumous compilation of the lecture notes done by his collogues. Like his introduction of the
synchronic study of language, he has made various other claims regarding language.
Firstly, he denies that there is any natural connection between words and things, implying that
reality isn’t independent of language and language cannot be reduced to ‘name-giving system’.
Saussure seems to be suggesting that we make our understanding of the world by language and
sees the worlds through language.
Furthers, Saussure argues, language is a system of signs which has no meaning and place in
isolation, but can only understood in relation to the difference with other words; for example,
Saussure is theorizing that we think of Cat, the word, as Cat, the object because the Cat is not
Dog; Dog is understood as Dog because it is not table.
Saussure later introduces the concepts of ‘langue’ and ‘parole’. Langue and parole are two
dimensions of language as the former refers to a structured system of the language, based on
certain rules and latter refers to personal or a specific understanding of the language, or the
utterance of the thought in a personalized way but which is based on the rules of the langue.
Saussure makes a distinction between speech and language: he argues, language is
heterogeneous and speech is homogeneous. That is to say, in the process of construction,
language, gets collectively approved by communities and all the people who are sharing a
common language; therefore, language is a social institution which is uniquely different from
legal and political institutions—on the other hand, speech is, as Saussure writes: “It is a system of
signs in which the only essential thing is the union of meanings and sound-images, and in which
both parts of the sign are psychological.”
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In the Course, Saussure explains the ‘Nature of the Linguistic Signs’, which is, in some way,
his understanding of the concept of sign that was unknown to us before him and has impacted
literary and cultural theory to an un-ignorable extent. Saussure subdivides ‘sign’ into ‘signifier’
and ‘signified’; and, he argues, that both concepts of the sign are psychological.
The sign doesn’t unite a name and a thing but a concept and a sound-image. And to further break
this terminology, Saussure suggests: ‘sign’, the whole, ‘signified’, the concept, and ‘signifier’,
the sound-image. A sign, therefore, consists of a signifier and a signified. For instance, the object
table is a sign; the concept of a table is signified by using the signifier, the word or sound image,
table.
In other words, Saussure says: a sign that refers to the object consists of signified and signifier
which has no relation with the object. Signifier and signified are psychological concepts;
therefore, language cannot be understood in the conventional sense, where it is understood as
having a ready-made structure and is reduced to having the purpose of naming. This profound
understanding of the language actually motivated him to argue to have an entirely new
discipline, that would be called, as he suggested, ‘semiology’.
This profound understanding of the language actually motivated him to argue to have an entirely
new discipline, that would be called, as he suggested, ‘semiology’.
