Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure (26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist and semiotician whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments both in linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is considered along with Charles Sanders Peirce the father of semiotics. 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, but rather for the innovative approach that Saussure applied in discussing linguistic phenomena. His influence in the twentieth-century linguistics was on a whole range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. His central thesis was that the primary object in studying a language is the state of that language at a particular time - a so-called synchronic study. He went on to claim that a language state is a socially constituted system of signs which are quite arbitrary and which can be defined only in terms of their relationship within the system. This new perspective has changed the way people think about linguistics and has led to important attempts to apply structuralist ideas in anthropology, literary criticism, and philosophy.
Literature
- Books by Saussure
- Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (Dissertation on the Primitive Vowel System in Indo-European Languages), 1878
- Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics), Payot, 1916
- Course in General Linguistics, Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, in collaboration with Albert Reidlinger, Translated from the French by Wade Baskin, The Philosophical Library, INC., 1959 (English transl.)
- Predavanja iz splošnega jezikoslovja, ISH, Ljubljana, 1997 (Slovenian transl.)
- Charles Bally, Léopold Gautier (ed.), Recueil des publications scientifiques de Ferdinand de Saussure, Payot, 1922
- Cours de linguistique générale, édition critique par Tullio de Mauro (1967), Payot, 1972-
- Écrits de linguistique générale, établis et édités par Simon Bouquet et Rudolf Engler, avec la collaboration d'Antoinette Weil, Éditions Gallimard, 2002
- Scrieri de lingvistică generală, Polirom Publishing House, Iasi, 2003 (Romanian transl.)
- Books about Saussure
- Jean Starobinski, Les mots sous les mots: Les anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure, Gallimard, Paris, 1971
- Ana María Nethol (ed.), Ferdinand de Saussure. Fuentes manuscritas y estudios críticos, XXI Editores SA, 1971, 1985
- Roy Harris, Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein. How to play games with words, Routledge, 1988
- David Holdcroft, Saussure Signs, System and Arbitrariness, Cambrigde University Press, 1991
- Carol Sanders (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Saussure, Oxford University Press, 2004
Links
- Saussure on Wikipedia
- les Fond Saussure (in French)
