Ferdinand de Saussure

1857-1913. Swiss linguist.

Biography

Saussure was born into a family of intellectuals primarily devoted to the natural sciences such as physics and chemistry. Following the family tradition, he started studying chemistry and physics but soon gave preference to philosophy and philology, i.e. Ancient Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, whose discovery by Sir William Jones in 1876 was a sensation. In 1876, at the age of 19, he was admitted access to Société Linguistique de Paris, an elitist circle where linguistic matters were presented and discussed. He studied in Berlin and Leipzig under August Leskien and Friedrich Zarncke who were the leading linguists at that time; he also published his first book Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes at the age of 21. In 1880 he finished working on his dissertation entitled De l’emploi du Genitif absolu en Sanskrit. After ten years of teaching at the École pratique des hautes Études in Paris he finally returned to Geneva where he was offered an associate professorship for the history and comparison of Indoeuropean languages. In the academic year of 1906/1907 he took the chair of general linguistics at the University of Geneva and held his famous lectures which would later be published as Course in General Linguistics by his successors Charles Bally and Albert Sechaye after his death in 1916. It is interesting to note that he did not study linguistics but later held the chair of general linguistics.

Course in General Linguistics: History of Origin and Basic Ideas

From 1906 to 1911 Saussure held three lectures on linguistic matters. He never prepared a fully enunciated manuscript so that when Sechaye and Bally decided to make his findings available to the public, they needed to reconstruct the lectures through notes made by Saussure's students. They collected fragments and compared notes in order to build a whole image of Saussure's thought.

Saussure's ideas, although not all of them completely new, became fundamental elements of modern linguistics.

The Nature of Signs: Signifiant, Signifié and Arbitrariness
Langage, Langue, Parole
Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Relations
Synchronic and diachronic axes
Valeur

Selected Works

Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (1878/79)
De l’emploi du Genitif absolu en Sanskrit (1880)
Course in General Linguistics (1916)

Sources

Amsterdamska, Olga. Schools of Thought: the Development of Linguistics from Bopp to Saussure. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987.
Arens, Hans. Sprachwissenschaft. Der Gang ihrer Entwicklung von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969.
Helbig, Gerhard. Geschichte der neuen Sprachwissenschaft. Unter dem besonderen Aspekt der Grammatik-Theorie. München: Huber, 1973.
Yule, George. The Study of Language. Third Edition. Cambridge: CUP, 2006.