Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)Course in General Linguistics (1916)

Swiss linguist, one of the founders of semiotics and a crucial influence on the development of structuralism. Born in Geneva, Saussure studied in Leipzig, Berlin, and Geneva. He taught in Paris for several years, before taking the chair of linguistics at the University of Geneva. He only published one work in his lifetime, a massive study of the vowel system in Indo-European languages, which appeared in 1878. However, it is the lecture courses he gave between 1906 and 1911, assembled from student notes by his former students and published posthumously as Cours de Linguistique Générale (1916), translated as Course in General Linguistics (1959), which brought him lasting fame. Saussure and his students are sometimes referred to as the Geneva School. Although trained as a philologist, Saussure realized that the history or etymology of particular words does not explain either their actual origin or their contemporary meaning . This observation gave rise to two crucial hypotheses: first, that the association of a particular sound and a particular word and its meaning is arbitrary (there is no intrinsic reason that the word for the object we call a bat should either be bat or sound like ‘bat’); second, these arbitrary choices are governed by a general system of meaning-making that is universal (i.e. common to every language). This distinction between language as it is used (parole) and its rules of use (langue) underpins the entire so-called structuralist revolution. Taking this langue/parole distinction a step further, Saussure argued that the spoken word has to be considered a sign comprising two elements—signifier and signified—which, in a famous phrase, he said were like opposite sides of a single sheet of paper. The signifier is the actual acoustic sound, e.g. ‘bat’, which must be distinguishable from other sounds and repeatable, while the signified is the concept we arbitrarily associate with that sound (bearing in mind that different languages can associate different concepts with ostensibly the same sounds). What is important to note here is that Saussure does not define the signifier as pointing to a thing in the world (referent). Structuralism was born from the intuitive leap made by people like Claude Lévi-Strauss (in anthropology) and Jacques Lacan (in psychoanalysis) that other human constructed systems—kinship, the unconscious, films, and so on—could be seen to behave ‘like a language’ in this respect

What was Saussure’s new theory of language? The diversity of languages, often thought to indicate a falling away from one original language (as in the story of Babel), indicated to Saussure not a story but a principle: the principle of the “arbitrary” (purely conventional) nature of the sign. Since there are thousands of human languages, the relation between words and things cannot be based on natural resemblances. For example, no inherent affinity of motivation leads people to call an avian creature bird or oiseau. Not only that, Saussure went on, but language is not a nomenclature. Rather than the world consisting of things that need names (the Adamic conception), each language brings into being, by describing, a world that it then knows as external. To be sure, the external world exists – but its reality remains quite nebulous until language articulates it. The way lines divide concepts and phrases, the way even concrete items are viewed, is specific to each language; each covers all that needs to be said, but in its different way.

La langage is a general human faculty, that which enables us to speak of “body language” or “the language of fashion”. La langue is the name for specific languages (la langue anglaise, the English language). It is also the most general term for, the term Saussure uses to name the object of linguistics. La langue in this sense does not exist: it is a theoretical object abstracted from the structures of specific languages. La parole (speech) is what Saussure calls “the executive side”: the concrete utterances that constitute all acts of language. These individual utterances are excluded from his theory of language insofar as they only “execute” possibilities that exist in language already, or depart from it for creative purposes without fundamentally changing it.

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