Ferdinand de Saussure

Lore & Background

Saussure was born in Geneva in 1857. His father, Henri Louis Frédéric de Saussure, was a mineralogist, entomologist, and taxonomist. He showed signs of considerable talent and intellectual ability as early as the age of fourteen. After graduating at the top of his class, he was sent to the Collège de Genève, where he spent a year studying Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit, and attended courses at the University of Geneva. He began graduate work at the University of Leipzig in October 1876. At age 21, he published a book on the primitive vowel system in Indo-European languages. He earned his doctorate in February 1880 and relocated to the University of Paris, where he lectured on Sanskrit, Gothic, and Old High German. He taught at the École pratique des hautes études for eleven years and was named Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur. In 1892, he returned to Switzerland to accept a professorship in Geneva, lecturing on Sanskrit and Indo-European for the remainder of his life. He began teaching the Course of General Linguistics in 1907, offering it three times until summer 1911. He died in 1913 in Vufflens-le-Château.

Reader's Guide

Saussure's most influential work, Course in General Linguistics, was published posthumously in 1916 by former students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, based on notes from his lectures. The Course became one of the seminal linguistics works of the 20th century. His theoretical reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European vocalic system, particularly his theory of laryngeals, found confirmation after the decipherment of Hittite. His notions became incorporated in the central tenets of structural linguistics, including the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign and the two-tiered reality of langue (abstract) and parole (actual speech). This framework was later adopted by Claude Lévi-Strauss for the study of myths. In Europe, the Prague school, notably Nikolay Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson, advanced phonological theory based on Saussurean hypotheses. In America, his ideas informed the distributionalism of Leonard Bloomfield, though his influence remained limited. Systemic functional linguistics is considered a post-Saussurean theory, with Michael Halliday arguing that Saussure's focus on the sign highlighted the arbitrariness of phonological shape while allowing the non-arbitrariness of grammatical structure to emerge.

Did You Know?

• Saussure hardly published anything during his lifetime; his most famous work, Course in General Linguistics, was compiled posthumously from student lecture notes.
• His publication on Lithuanian phonetics was largely taken from studies by Lithuanian researcher Friedrich Kurschat, as Saussure could not speak Lithuanian.
• Saussure attempted at various times in the 1880s and 1890s to write a book on general linguistic matters but never completed it.
• His son Raymond de Saussure was a psychiatrist and psychoanalytic theorist trained under Sigmund Freud.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"Ferdinand de Saussure (1910), Saussure's Third Course of Lectures on General Linguistics (1910-1911), Pergamon Press, 1993." — Ferdinand de Saussure "Linguistics is very closely related to other sciences that sometimes borrow from its data, sometimes supply it with data." — Ferdinand de Saussure "Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other." — Ferdinand de Saussure "Writing obscures language ; it is not a guise for language but a disguise." — Ferdinand de Saussure