Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was a Swiss linguist. His Course in General Linguistics (1916), reconstructed from students’ lecture notes and published posthumously, founded structural linguistics and established the tradition of semiology — the study of signs within social life.
Core ideas
- The dyadic sign: the sign is the union of signifier (sound-image) and signified (concept). These are inseparable — two sides of the same sheet of paper.
- Arbitrariness of the sign: the relation between signifier and signified is conventional, not natural. No inherent bond connects the sound “tree” to the concept of a tree.
- Differential meaning: signs do not carry positive content. Each sign gets its value from what it is not relative to other signs in the system.
- Langue and parole: langue is the abstract system of conventions shared by a speech community; parole is the individual act of speech. Linguistics, for Saussure, should study the system.
- Synchronic and diachronic analysis: the study of a language system at a given moment (synchronic) versus the study of its historical development (diachronic). Saussure privileged the synchronic.
Notable works
- Course in General Linguistics (1916, posthumous)
- Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (1879)
Related
- Saussurean Semiology — the tradition he founded
- signifier / signified — the dyadic sign components
- Charles Sanders Peirce — co-founder of modern semiotics, triadic rather than dyadic
- Roland Barthes — extended Saussurean semiology into cultural analysis