Ferdinand de Saussure

Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure (pronounced [f?r.di.nã.d?.so.'syr]) (November 26, 1857 - February 22, 1913) was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid the foundation for many of the significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered the 'father' of 20th-century linguistics.

Biography

Born in Geneva in 1857, Saussure was interested in languages early in his life. By age 15, he had learned Greek, French, German, English, and Latin, and at that age he also wrote an essay on languages. Being from a family of natural scientists, De Saussure began his education at the University of Geneva studying the natural sciences. He was there a year, and then convinced his parents to allow him to go to Leipzig in 1876 to study linguistics. Two years later at 21 years Saussure studied for a year at Berlin where he wrote his only full-length work titled Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européenes. He returned to Leipzig and was awarded his doctorate in 1880. Soon afterwards he relocated to Paris, where he would lecture on ancient and modern languages, and live for 11 years before returning to Geneva in 1891. Living in Geneva, where he taught Sanskrit and historical linguistics, he married there and had two sons. Saussure continued to lecture at the University for the remainder of his life. However, it was not until 1906 that Saussure began teaching the Course of General Linguistics that would consume the greater part of his attention until his death in 1913.

Contributions to linguistics

Laryngeal theory

While a student, Saussure published an important work in Indo-European philology that proposed the existence of a class of sounds in Proto-Indo-European called laryngeals, outlining what is now known as the laryngeal theory. It has been argued that the problem he encountered, of trying to explain how he was able to make systematic and predictive hypotheses from known linguistic data to unknown linguistic data, stimulated his development of structuralism.

The Course of General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique générale)

Saussure's most influential work, the Cours de linguistique générale (Course of General Linguistics), was published posthumously in 1916 by former students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye on the basis of notes taken from Saussure's lectures at the University of Geneva. The Cours became one of the seminal linguistics works of the 20th century, not primarily for the content (many of the ideas had been anticipated in the works of other 19th century linguists), but rather for the innovative approach that Saussure applied in discussing linguistic phenomena.

Saussure made what is now a famous distinction between langue (language) and parole (speech). Langue refers to the system of rules and conventions which is independent of, and pre-exists, individual users; parole refers to its use in particular instances. In separating language (langue) from speaking (parole) we are at the same time separating: (1) what is social from what is individual; and (2) what is essential from what is accessory and more or less accidental.

The most revolutionary element in Saussure's work is his insistence that languages don’t produce different versions of the same reality, they in effect produce different realities. That different languages conceptualize the world in significantly different ways is demonstrated by the fact that even such "physical" or "natural" phenomena as colours are not the same in different languages. Russian does not have a term for "blue". The words poluboi and sinij which are usually translated as "light blue" and "dark blue" refer to what are in Russian distinct colours not different shades of the same colour. The English word brown has no equivalent in French. It is translated into brun, marron, or even jeune depending on the context. In Welsh the colour glas, though often translated as "blue," contains elements which English would identify as "green" or "grey." Because the boundaries are placed differently in the two languages the Welsh equivalent of the English "grey" might be glas or llwyd.

In Saussure’s theory the language is mostly the mean of social communication with the help of “signs”, where the linguistic sign - a word - makes and defines the relationship between the acoustic image of the set of acoustic sounds or “signifier” ( for instance: f, a, m, i, l, y ) and the actual image ( or “signified” ) of a “family” in our consciousness . This relationship, or the bond between the signifier and signified is, both, arbitrary and necessary. The principle of arbitrariness dominates all ideas about the structure of language. It makes it possible to separate the signifier and signified, or to change the relation between them. The necessary part means that the set of acoustic sounds, i.e. “signifier” ( f, a, m, i, l, y ), evokes just the image of a thing “family” ( always, necessarily and, also, strictly ). There is no place for any socially-charged change or sensual addition, which the word “family” might otherwise evoke , in Saussure’s linguistic. This, strictly one-to-one, correspondence, therefore, often came under criticism of literary ( comparative ) linguists working with the concepts of esthetics, such as Vaclav Cerny .

Critiques of some of Saussure’s linguistic propositions from the “Course”

Several quotes from Saussure’s main work should illuminate some of the theories, particularly vis-a-vis real-life social organizations:

“……It is the social side of speech, outside the individual who can never create nor modify it by himself; it exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community…..” ( Saussure, p. 14).

“….Some people regard language ... as a naming process only ... This conception is open to criticism on several points. It assumes that ready-made ideas exist before words ...; finally, it lets us assume that the linking of a name and a thing is a very simple operation...” ( Saussure, p. 65).

“…..Without language thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language…..” ( Saussure, p. 112).

“…Linguistics then works in the borderland where the elements of sound and thought combine; their combination produces a form, not a substance. ... The arbitrary nature of the sign explains why the social fact alone can create a linguistic system. The community is necessary if values that owe their existence solely to usage and general acceptance are to be set up; by himself, the individual is incapable of fixing a single value…..” (Saussure, p. 113).

“….The term "arbitrary" should not imply that the choice of the signifier is left entirely to the speaker ...; I mean that it is unmotivated, i.e. arbitrary in that it actually has no natural connection with the signified….” (Saussure, pp. 68-69).

Few comments on the quotes :

The word "contract" ( on p.14) refers back to Rousseau's discussion of the "Social Contract" as the basis of sociability (along with its implicit critique of theories of legitimacy purely based on raw power). In so far “arbitrariness” ( pp. 68-69,113 ), there, in other words --- and against others ( such as Malinowski; see Varenne, <varenne.tc.columbia.edu/bib/info/sassrferd66courgene.html > ) who were developing an alternate theory of meaning in parallel to Saussure's --- no investigation of the "context" of an utterance can establish the "meaning" of a sign, that is its peculiar power as historical product constraining the future. It is "arbitrary", that is dependent on an implicit ( though not always ) agreement that this sign is to do anything in particular. The quote on p. 113 contrasts with G.H. Mead's insistence that the conversation of gestures precedes symbolic meaning ( see Varenne, <varenne.tc.columbia.edu/bib/info/sassrferd66courgene.html > ). And yet they both emphasize the "social." How would one bring the two together ?

It could, also, be argued that language usage is not (even in Saussure) a simple effect of `la langue': the system is not changed by the individual usage as such, but through the community, which the language as an institution helps to form.

However, this concept of social praxis, which becomes crucial if one wants to understand the proper establishment and change of the language system, is missing in Saussure. Social praxis is obviously a part of the larger reality that language is embedded in, but which structuralism seldom deals with in its methodological closure around the always already existing structure.

Some critiques ( see Bouissac ), perhaps based on very few direct Saussure’s successors, and on his basic text put together without serious editorial and conceptual work, added a new dimension to the debate and contributed to further reinforce the stereotype of a Saussurean doctrine which they contended had overlooked the social, processual, transformational and fundamentally temporal nature of languages and cultures. Thus, in may seem as if Saussure's approach was to study the system 'synchronically', as if it was frozen in time ( like a photograph ) rather than 'diachronically', in terms of its evolution over time ( like a film ).

Legacy

The impact of Saussure's ideas on the development of linguistic theory in the former half of the 20th century cannot be understated. Two currents of thought emerged independently of each other, one in Europe, the other in America. The results of each incorporated the basic notions of Saussurian thought in forming the central tenets of structural linguistics. In Europe, the most important work was being done by the Prague School where among its founders was Vilem Mathesius, Sergei Karczewski and Roman Jacobson. Roman Jakobson then transferred the efforts of the Prague School phonological theory in the decades following 1940 into the United States. Jakobson's universalizing structural-functional theory of phonology, based on a markedness hierarchy of distinctive features, was the first successful solution of a plane of linguistic analysis according to the Saussurean hypotheses. Elsewhere, Louis Hjelmslev and the Copenhagen School proposed new interpretations of linguistics from structuralist theoretical frameworks. In America, Saussure's ideas informed the distributionalism of Leonard Bloomfield and the post-Bloofieldian Structuralism of those scholars guided by and furthering the practices established in Bloomfield's investigations and analyses of language. In contemporary developments, structuralism has been most explicitly developed by Michael Silverstein, who has combined it with the theories of markedness and distinctive features.

Outside linguistics, the principles and methods employed by structuralism were soon adopted by scholars and literary critics, such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and implemented in their respective areas of study. However, their expansive interpretations of Saussure's theories, and their application of those theories to non-linguistic fields of study, led to theoretical difficulties and proclamations of the end of structuralism in those disciplines. This alone clearly underscores the fact that Saussure was no philosopher, only a ground-breaking theoretical linguist whose ideas could be summed up in a few words :

The differences we readily experience as independent of language are in fact constructed by it. This does not mean that language creates "actuality" (that is, trees, rocks, buildings, people) but that language turns undifferentiated, meaningless nature into a differentiated, meaningful cultural reality. The most significant feature of Saussure's work is the argument that language precedes experience. We have no direct access to the world; our relationship to it is always mediated by, and dependent on, language.

Literature

• Bouissac, P. Circus and Culture, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1976
• Bouissac, P., Perspectives on Saussure, University of Toronto , November 10, 2003
• Cerny,V. , Memoirs ( Pameti in Czech original ) , Sixty-Eight Publishers Corp. , Toronto, 1982, pp. 308-311,448
• Culler, Jonathan, Ferdinand de Saussure, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1986
• Varenne, Hervé, Quotes from Saussure's Course in General Linguistic <varenne.tc.columbia.edu/bib/info/sassrferd66courgene.html>
• Saussure, Ferdinand de , Course in General Linguistics ,Tr. by W. Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill. 1966 <../auth/sassrferd.html>

External links

• Hearing Heidegger and Saussure by Elmer G. Wiens.

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