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 ta ing the chair of linguistics at the !niversity of Geneva. He only published one wor in his lifetime, a massive study of the vowel system in "ndo#$uropean languages, which appeared in %&'&. However, it is the lecture courses he gave between %()* and %(%%, assembled from student notes by his former students and published posthumously as Cours de Linguistique Gnrale +%(%*,, translated as Course in General Linguistics +%(-(,, which brought him lasting fame. Saussure and his students are sometimes referred to as the Geneva School. .lthough trained as a philologist, Saussure realized that the history or etymology of parti ular !ords does not e"plain either their a tual origin or their ontemporary meaning . /his observation gave rise to two crucial hypotheses0 first, that the asso iation of a parti ular sound and a parti ular !ord and its meaning is ar#itrary ( there is no intrinsic reason that the word for the ob1ect we call a bat should either be bat or sound li e 2bat3 )4 second, these ar#itrary hoi es are go$erned #y a general system of meaning-ma%ing that is uni$ersal (i&e& ommon to e$ery language). /his distin tion #et!een language as it is used (parole) and its rules of use (langue) underpins the entire so- alled stru turalist re$olution . /a ing this langue5parole distinction a step further, Saussure argued that the spo%en !ord has to #e onsidered a sign omprising t!o elements'signifier and signified6which, in a famous phrase, he said were li e opposite sides of a single sheet of paper& (he signifier is the a tual a ousti sound) e&g& *#at+, which must be distinguishable from other sounds and repeatable, while the signified is the on ept !e ar#itrarily asso iate !ith that sound +bearing in mind that different languages can associate different concepts with ostensibly the same sounds,. 7hat is important to note here is that Saussure does not define the signifier as pointing to a thing in the !orld (referent). Structuralism was born from the intuitive leap made by people li e 8laude L9vi#Strauss +in anthropology, and :ac;ues Lacan +in psychoanalysis, that other human onstru ted systems'%inship) the un ons ious) films) and so on' ould #e seen to #eha$e *li%e a language+ in this respe t

7hat was Saussure3s new theory of language< /he 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 principle0 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. ?or e@ample, no inherent affinity of motivation leads people to call an avian creature bird or oiseau. Aot only that, Saussure went on, but language is not a nomenclature. Bather than the world consisting of things that need names +the .damic conception,, each language brings into being, by describing, a world that it then nows as e@ternal. /o be sure, the e@ternal world e@ists C but its reality remains ;uite nebulous until language articulates it. /he way lines divide concepts and phrases, the way even concrete items are viewed, is specific to each language4 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 spea of =body language> or =the language of fashion>. La langue is the name for specific languages +la langue anglaise, the $nglish language,. "t is also the most general term for, the term Saussure uses to name the ob1ect of linguistics. La langue in this sense does not e@ist0 it is a theoretical ob1ect abstracted from the structures of specific languages. La parole +speech, is what Saussure calls =the e@ecutive side>0 the concrete utterances that constitute all acts of language. /hese individual utterances are e@cluded from his theory of language insofar as they only =e@ecute> possibilities that e@ist in language already, or depart from it for creative purposes without fundamentally changing it.