Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure (November 26,1857 - February 22, 1913) was a Swiss linguist.

Related Topics:
November 26 - 1857 - February 22 - 1913 - Swiss - Linguist

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Born in Geneva, he laid the foundation for many developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He perceived linguistics as a branch of a general science of signs he proposed to call semiology (now generally known as semiotics).

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Geneva - Linguistics - 20th century - Science - Semiotics

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His work Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics) was published posthumously in 1916 by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye based on lecture notes. This became one of the seminal linguistics works of the 20th century. Its central notion is that language can be analyzed as a formal system of organized difference, apart from the messy dialectics of realtime production and comprehension. Additionally, at a very young age he published a very important work in Indo-European philology which put forward what is now known as the laryngeal theory. It has been argued that the problem of trying to explain how he himself was able to make systematic predictive hypotheses from known linguistic data to unknown linguistic data, stimulated his development of structuralism.

Related Topics:
Cours de linguistique générale - 1916 - Charles Bally - Albert Sechehaye - Seminal - Indo-European - Philology - Laryngeal theory

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His work had two receptions which developed it in two very different ways. In America it flowered as developed by Leonard Bloomfield into distributionalism, and has since then been presupposed by all linguistic science. This Saussurean influence, however, has been disavowed by Noam Chomsky, among others. In contemporary developments, it has been most explicitly developed by Michael Silverstein who has combined it with the theories of markedness and distinctive features the Prague School (most importantly Nikolay Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson invented for the plane of analysis of phonology, the Sapir-Whorfian theory of the grammatical category, and the insight of transformational analysis, in order to analyze the plane of Saussurean sense proper. In Europe, important contributions were quickly made by Emile Benveniste, Antoine Meillet, and Andre Martinet, among others. However, structuralism was soon picked up and calqued by students of other, non-linguistic aspects of culture, such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Their expansive interpretations of Saussure's theories, and their application of those theories to non-linguistic fields of study led to theoretical difficulties, eventually causing proclamations of the "death" of structuralism in those disciplines.

Related Topics:
Leonard Bloomfield - Noam Chomsky - Michael Silverstein - Prague School - Nikolay Trubetzkoy - Roman Jakobson - Phonology - Sapir - Whorf - Emile Benveniste - Antoine Meillet - Andre Martinet - Roland Barthes - Jacques Lacan - Claude Lévi-Strauss

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

Related Topics:
Sign - Parole

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