Ferdinand de Saussure's Biography

Biography

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) was a Swiss linguist who occupies an important place in the history of linguistics. His father was Henri Louis Frédéric de Saussure, a mineralogist, entomologist, and taxonomist.   He was the pivotal figure in the transition from the 19th to 20th century, and is generally considered the founder of modern linguistics. Saussure was a classmate of Brugmann and Leskien, and an important figure in the young grammarians. He published a few highly respected papers, but his more influential work was published after his death. His students at the University of Geneva were so impressed by his lectures that they thought his ideas concerning linguistic questions were original and insightful and should be preserved. So his students collected and edited their notes and published his Courses in General Linguistic (Cours de Linguistique Generale) in 1916, three years after his death.  He died in 1913 in Vufflens-le-Château, VD Switzerland.

 Leonard Bloomfield justly credited the eminent Swiss professor with providing “ a theoretic foundation to the newer trend in linguistics study," and European scholars have seldom failed to consider his views when dealing with any theoretical problem.

Jonathan Culler (1976) says, “Ferdinand de Saussure is the father of modern linguistics, the man who reorganized the systematic study of language and language in such a way as to make possible the achievements of twentieth-century linguists. This alone would make him a Modern Master: master of a discipline which he made modern."

De Saussure was responsible for three key directions in the study of language.

1.-First, he broke with the young grammarians by pointing the distinction between historical linguistics and the state of language at any point in time. He was determined to delimit and define the boundaries of languge study. To this end he began by distinguishing between historical linguistics and descriptive linguistics, or diachronic and synchronic analyses respectively.

Synchronic linguistics sees language as a living whole, existing as a “state" at a particular point in time. It is descriptive linguistics that concerns with the state of a languge at any point in time, especially the present.  Diachronic linguistics deals with the evolution of a language through time, as a continually changing medium—a never-ending succession of language states.

Language system is complete and operates as a logical system or any point in time regardless of influence from the past. A language has an existence separate from its history.

2.- This led to de Saussure's second contribution; the distinction between language and parole. Language is such a complex and varied phenomenon that it would be impossible to study it without assuming some basic operating principles. Saussure made a distinction among three main senses of language, and then concentrated on two of them. He envisaged language (human speech as a whole) to be composed of two aspects, which are called langue (the language system) and parole (the act of speaking).

 Langue was considered by Saussure to be the totality of a language, deducible from an examination of the memories of all the language users. Langue, then, is an abstract system that all of us have in common and enables us to speak. It is the cognitive apparatus that members of a community share that allows them to use the vocabulary, grammar, and phonology in order to actualize speech.

 Langue is what the individual assimilates when he learns a language; it exists in the mind of each speaker. “It is the social product whose existence permits the individual to exercise his linguistic faculty. Saussure argued strongly that the characteristics of langue were really present in the brain, and not simply abstractions.

Parole, on the other hand, is the “executive side of language." Parole, is the actualization of langue. It is the way we actually speak---the vocabulary, accent, and syntactic forms.  It is a personal, dynamic and social activity, which exists at a particular time and place and in a particular situation, as opposed to langue, which exists apart from any particular manifestation in speech.

The distinction between Langue and parole is important. In distinguishing them, we are separating what is social from what is individual, and what is essential from what is accidental.

 3.- Saussure's third main theoretical contribution was to clarify the concept of a language system and many linguists feel that it was this facet of his thought that had the most profound influence on subsequent scholarship. He completed his tenets of structuralism. He showed that the principles of langue must be described synchronically as a system of elements composed of lexical， grammatical, and phonological components.

The most immediate and significant impact of de Saussure's structural theory was in the area of phonology. It led to the concept of the phoneme as a distinct and indivisible sound of a language. Although de Saussure's structuralism was crucial to the development of phonology, he was really interested in the larger and more abstract “system of signs." Linguistics was really the study of signs and their relationships.

De Saussure characterized signs as a relationship between “concept" and “sound" to use de Saussure's words signified and signifier. Saussure called this relationship of signified to signifier a linguistic sign.

The sign, for him, is the basic unit of communication, a unit within the langue of the community. Langue, in this way, can be viewed as a system of signs.   The linguistic sign is constituted by the structural relationship between the concept (e.g., “house"---the signified) and the sound of the word “house" (signifier). A language is essentially composed of such structural relationships, and the study of language is the study of the system of signs that express ideas.

Two types of structural relationship in a language system presented by de Saussure are syntagmatic and associative. Syntagmatic relationships of a word are those relationships that can obtain with neighboring in a sentence.