Saussure, Ferdinand de

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) is usually considered to be the father of modern linguistics. Born in Geneva into an illustrious family that included famous natural scientists, Saussure trained as a comparative philologist, studying (1876-78) in Leipzig, the main center of the Neogrammatical movement. There he gave precocious proof of his genius with a Mémoire (1879) containing insights that lie at the root of some of the most interesting twentieth-century developments in comparative philology. After a period of studying and teaching in Paris (1880-91), Saussure was called in 1891 to teach Sanskrit in Geneva. He published relatively little in his lifetime (see his Recueil 1922). Between 1907 and 1911, he taught three courses in general linguistics to small groups of students. After his death, two of his colleagues (Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, with the help of one of his students, Albert Riedlinger), on the basis of students' lecture notes and some of Saussure's own jottings, compiled a coherent Cours de linguistique générale (CLG; 1916). It proved to be perhaps the most influential text in linguistics, at least up to the publication of Noam Chomsky's work.

Before looking at some of Saussure's ideas, one needs to comment on the difficulties posed by their interpretation. As the text was not written by Saussure, the problem of establishing what certain passages of the CLG meant exactly and how far they represented the ideas of the "author" grew so complex that it became difficult to take a fresh look at questions without becoming embroiled in a specialized hermeneutic apparatus. The most useful contributions are Godel (1957), Engler (1967-74), De Mauro (1967), and the publication of sets of individual students' notes (see the volumes of the journal Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure).

A further difficulty was added by the spread of post-modern attitudes (some claiming, ironically, a Saussurean inspiration) according to which it is impossible in this case, and anyway illegitimate in principle, to try to establish the correct meaning of a text, because texts are inevitably constructed by readers. "Semiological" readings of the CLG were proposed, which sometimes appeared more stimulating than convincing. To this we can finally add the fact that several linguistic movements refer to Saussure as the source of some of their insights, so that it has become difficult to separate Saussure's own ideas from those belonging to his followers (Lepschy 1982). We can quote the Genevan School of his immediate successors, the Danish Glossematic group of Louis Hjelmslev, some members of the  Prague Circle (in particular Roman JAKOBSON and Nikolaj Sergeevic Trubeckoj), and many of the French trends that are loosely associated under the banner of "structuralism" or "post-structuralism," from Roland Barthes's semiology, to Jacques Lacan's brand of psychoanalysis, to Althusser's variety of Marxism, to Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS' structural anthropology, to Michel Foucault's cultural archaeology, to Jacques Derrida's deconstructionism. In the tradition of American linguistics, however, the influence of Saussure was limited from the start and further restricted by his being (misleadingly) associated with structural linguistics, which, in its post-Bloomfieldian incarnation, had next to nothing in common with Saussure.

Some of the main ideas that are central in the CLG are rooted in the debates current at the turn of the century concerning the nature of scientific explanation, the relation between natural sciences and the humanities (Naturwissenschaften vs. Geisteswissenschaften), the distinction between nomothetic and idiographic disciplines, and the place of linguistics within this intellectual map. The CLG introduced a series of dichotomies that are still, in one way or another, present in current research. The main ones are the following four.

  1. Synchronic versus diachronic viewpoint: In the early twentieth century it was taken for granted that the scientific study of language had to be diachronic. Saussure's position was crucial in redressing the balance and in establishing synchronic study as a fully legitimate activity, indeed the one in which the most important insights of modern linguistics were to be obtained.
  2. Syntagmatic versus associative (or, as it was later called, paradigmatic): Based on the psychological theories of the time, this was made into a basic distinction between two Cartesian axes: on the horizontal one the linear succession of units constituting the message, on the vertical one the set of items constituting the code.
  3. Langue versus parole: The former refers to what is abstract (form), general, and social; the latter to the concrete (substance), specific, and individual speech acts.
  4. Signifier versus signified: This is a more strictly semiotic dichotomy. The linguistic sign has two sides, expression and content, which do not exist without each other and yet can be separately analyzed; their relation is arbitrary, not in the traditional sense of a conventional relation between word and thing, as illustrated by the very existence of different languages, but in a deeper, more radical sense, referring to the split that runs through the very nature of language.

In the context of cognitive views as embodied in GENERATIVE GRAMMAR one can observe an analogy (which is obviously not an identity) between the langue/parole distinction and that of competence/performance, and a link between the notion of the arbitrary nature of the sign and that of the distance between surface and deep structures. An aspect that sets Saussure's views apart from those of contemporary linguistics is that whereas for him SYNTAX has a marginal and unclear status (linked mainly to the structure of individual acts of parole), nowadays it is thought to have a central and creative function.

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Additional links

-- Giulio Lepschy

References

Godel, R. (1957). Les Sources Manuscrites du Cours de Linguistique Générale de F. de Saussure. Geneva and Paris: Droz-Minard.

Lepschy, G. (1982). A Survey of Structural Linguistics. New ed. London: Deutsch.

Saussure, F. de. (1879). Mémoire sur le Système Primitif des Voyelles dans les Langues Indoeuropéennes. Leipzig: Teubner.

Saussure, F. de. (1916). Cours de Linguistique Générale. Lausanne-Paris: Payot. (with De Mauro's notes, 1972).

Saussure, F. de. (1922). Recueil des Publications Scientifiques. Geneva: Sonor.

Saussure, F. de. (1959). Course in General Linguistics, trans. by W. Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library.

Saussure, F. de. (1967). Corso di Linguistica Générale. Italian translation and commentary by T. De Mauro. Bari: Laterza.

Saussure, F. de. (1967-74). Cours de Linguistique Générale. R. Engler, Ed. 4 vols. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Saussure, F. de. (1983). Course in General Linguistics, trans. by R. Harris. London: Duckworth.

Starobinski, J. (1971). Les mots sous les mots. Les anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure. Paris: Gallimard .

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