Ferdinand Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose work laid the foundation for structuralism and semiotics. He is best known for his distinction between langue (the underlying system of language) and parole (actual instances of speech). Saussure's ideas have had a significant impact on literary theory, particularly in the analysis of language and meaning in literature.
8 Key excerpts on "Ferdinand Saussure"
eBook - ePub- Andrew Edgar, Peter Sedgwick, Andrew Edgar, Peter Sedgwick(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...SAUSSURE, FERDINAND DE (1857–1913) The Swiss-born linguist Ferdinand de Saussure was responsible for the development of semiotics as a form of structural linguistics. As such, his work is of fundamental importance to structuralism (and influenced Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Jakobson and the young Barthes) and remains of relevance to cultural studies, not least in that it provides one of the most powerful explanations of how human beings might ascribe meaning to the world in which they live. During his lifetime, Saussure was best known as a Sanskrit scholar. His reputation now rests upon a series of lectures given towards the end of his life, and published, from his notes and notes made by his students, as the Course in General Linguistics (1916), that begin to articulate an alternative to the historically orientated linguistics of the nineteenth century. Saussure challenges the idea that there is some intrinsic or historically emergent relationship between a word and its meaning. In order to analyse meaning, Saussure distinguishes between the signified and the signifier. The former is that to which language refers (which is a concept rather than a concrete object); the latter is that which does the referring (a word or sound pattern). While a sign is composed of these two elements, the relationship between them is held to be arbitrary, in the sense that it depends upon a cultural convention (and not upon some fixed point outside language and outside culture). Thus, it is merely a convention of the English language that the noise ‘dog’ refers to the concept of a domestic animal that barks. Saussure is not, however, concerned with the workings of a particular language (such as English or French), but with the rules that govern all languages. He thus distinguishes ‘la parole’ from ‘la langue’. ‘Parole’ is composed of the concrete utterances of members of a language community. These concrete utterances are taken to manifest an underlying structure. This structure is ‘langue’...
eBook - ePub- Diana Newall, Grant Pooke(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...1540–1550, oil on wood, 146.5 × 116.8 cm. National Gallery, London. Semiotics is the study of signs and signification. It developed from studies of language and logic undertaken independently by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) in Switzerland and Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These theories have been elaborated and extended through the twentieth century, mostly as two separate stands of research which have influenced the definition and interpretation of art within art history, especially in relation to gender theory and contemporary art (discussed in more detail in Chapters 6 and 7). Saussure and Peirce (pronounced ‘purse’) developed different theories for explaining the workings of linguistic signs. Saussure explored signs in relation to language. Fundamentally, language is a means of communication between human beings and is also used by animals (Sebeok 1972). The academic study of languages is called linguistics. The components of language are verbal – relating to speech, sounds or phonetics – and written – relating to the written representation of sounds and words. The academic discipline of linguistics studies the structures and relationships of these different components in order to understand the construction and origins of languages. For example, linguists might consider the structures within a written language, the structural connections between two different languages or the relationships between verbal and written forms of a language. A discipline subset is phonetics, which studies the sound systems of languages and how individual verbal sounds (phonemes) form words. Ferdinand de Saussure Saussure explored language from a perspective different to these approaches. He sought to explain how words in a language – linguistic signs – mean what they mean. He wanted to understand the construction of signs and their meaning rather than the structures of specific languages...
eBook - ePubModern Criticism and Theory
A Reader
- Nigel Wood, David Lodge(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...2 Ferdinand de Saussure DOI: 10.4324/9781315835488-2 Introductory note Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was a Swiss linguist who studied in Germany and France before taking up a university chair in his native city of Geneva, which he occupied for the rest of his life. Saussure is widely regarded as the father of modern linguistics. He is included in this Reader because his theory of language and how it should be studied played a seminal part in the development of ‘structuralism’ as a method in the human sciences, and thus significantly affected the course of literary studies in this century. The theory was never published by Saussure himself in a complete and authoritative form. The Course in General Linguistics (first published in Paris in 1915) which goes under his name was compiled by colleagues after his death, based on lecture notes taken down by Saussure’s students in his lifetime. Its most recent translator and editor, Roy Harris, has described it as ‘without doubt one of the most far-reaching works concerning the study of human cultural activities to have been published at any time since the Renaissance.’ Before Saussure, the study of language, or philology as it was usually called, had been essentially historical, tracing change and development in phonology and semantics within and between languages or groups of languages. Saussure argued that a scientific linguistics could never be based on such a ‘diachronic’ study but only by approaching language as a ‘synchronic’ system, i.e., a system of which all the elements and rules are in theory simultaneously available to the user of the language...
eBook - ePubTheory in Social and Cultural Anthropology
An Encyclopedia
- R. Jon McGee, Richard L. Warms(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...H. Stephen Straight H. Stephen Straight Saussure, Ferdinand de Saussure, Ferdinand de 748 753 Saussure, Ferdinand de Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was a Swiss linguist whose ideas about the scientific study of language provided the basis for what came to be known as structuralism. In the field of linguistics proper, he is widely recognized as the father of 20th-century linguistics. More broadly in the humanities and social sciences, his ideas are linked to those of the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, to make Saussure a cofounder of semiotics, the all-encompassing study of sign systems, of which language is but one. Saussure’s most radical departure from previous views of language lies in the distinction he made between langue and parole. The colloquial meaning of langue is “tongue; language,” while parole means “speech; word,” as in “take my word for it.” Saussure meant something very different by these terms. Locating them in two distinct portions of the neuropsychological circuitry that underlies listening and speaking, he said that langue is the portion in which auditory images become associated with concepts, while parole is the portion in which speakers’ communicative intentions become associated with producible output. Saussure went on to say that of these two components, the proper focus of the scientific study of language is langue, because it is shared by everyone in a given speech community. In fact, it is the shared ability to associate specific auditory input with the same concepts that defines a speech community. In contrast, Saussure said, parole is diverse and confusing because speakers use their language in idiosyncratic and unpredictable ways...
eBook - ePub- Diana Newall, Grant Pooke, Diana Newall(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...A subset of the discipline is phonetics, which studies the sound systems of languages and how individual verbal sounds (phonemes) form words. FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE Saussure explored language from a perspective diferent to these approaches. He sought to explain how words in a language – linguistic signs – mean what they mean. He wanted to understand the construction of signs and their meaning rather than the structures of specific languages. Saussure indentified two components in the linguistic sign: • the physical element, the actual spoken or written word – the signifier; • the mental concept, the idea of the sign – the signified. These two components are interdependent but separate. For example, if I say the word ‘shoe’ there is the phonetic sound and the idea in my mind of what a shoe is. It is not a specific shoe (such as the left green suede shoe), but a general concept of a shoe. I cannot say the word shoe, and you cannot hear it, without invoking the idea of a shoe. In separating the two components, Saussure acknowledged their arbitrary relationship. Not only could other signifiers conjure the same mental concept (for example, different languages have different words for shoe), but also the word shoe is just the word which has been assigned by time, convention and practice. That is not to say that signifiers can be changed randomly but that there is no intrinsic reason for a particular signifier/signified relationship. The arbitrary nature of the signifier/signified relationship means that language is in some ways constructed independent of the reality which it describes. Saussure also claimed that the meaning of the word shoe is relational and depends on its difference from other words. Put another way, because the word shoe only arbitrarily means the concept of a shoe it requires the context of and difference from other words and concepts to give it meaning. Therefore shoe is different phonetically from ‘two’ or ‘hoe’, and conceptually from boot or sock...
eBook - ePubCritical Theory to Structuralism
Philosophy, Politics and the Human Sciences
- David Ingram(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...After 1968, Saussure increasingly joined the ranks of the maîtres à penser to be critiqued and deconstructed by poststructuralists such as Jacques Derrida and Foucault, who were skeptical of science and critical of the links between knowledge and power. I. FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE Ferdinand de Saussure was born in Geneva into an affluent protestant francophone family celebrated for its generations of scholastic achievements. He learned German, Latin, and classical Greek in school, then taught himself Sanskrit. In 1876, he joined the Société de Linguistique de Paris, twelve years after its foundation, and enrolled at the University of Leipzig. There he studied comparative grammar, the most advanced linguistics of the day, with the cutting-edge group of young scholars dubbed the Junggrammatiker or “Neo-grammarians.” Whereas rationalism and pre-nineteenth-century linguistic inquiry present language as a stable intellectual instrument, the comparative and historical linguistics launched by Franz Bopp revealed the dynamic character of idioms and highlighted their material substratum in sound. Introducing the phonological concept of regularity, the Neogrammarians Karl Brugmann, August Leskien, Herman Osthoff, and their colleagues in Leipzig showed that sound changes occur in absolutely regular fashion throughout a language, while analogical formations account for apparent exceptions. The Neogrammarians developed a new model of linguistic history: whereas the Romantic founders Bopp and August Schleicher had described the formation of a perfect Ursprache that “decayed” and fragmented in Time, the Leipzig scholars contended that like all languages, the Proto-Indo-European they were reconstructing comprised a host of dialects that developed at what was simply one chronological moment among others...
eBook - ePubLanguage and Materialism
Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject
- Rosalind Coward, John Ellis(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...3 Semiology as a science of signs Saussure foresaw a 'semiology' of which linguistics would be at once one part and the privileged methodological guide. It was this 'science of the life of signs within society' that saw a rapid growth in France in the 1950s and 1960s, and it was the developments from this basis that led to the critique of the notion of the sign and of the structuralist method outlined in the last chapter. Semiology aims to take in any system of signs, whatever their substance and limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all of these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment: these constitute, if not languages, at least systems of signification (Barthes, Elements of Semiology, p. 9). Food and clothes, for instance, carry meanings which organise their usage: there are conventions of eating and clothing, as well as meanings attached to both individual items and combinations of food and apparel. 'Confronted with the "limitless text" of fashion, food, furniture, urban design, all the day-to-day phenomena of life, the semiologist tries to understand the diverse processes of signification by the elaboration of models fitted to realise the system of intelligibility of each object' (S. Heath, Vertige du déplacement, p. 62). Semiology was thus an extension of the methods of Saussurean linguistics into new territories. At first, the tools furnished by linguistics – the conception of signifies and signifieds caught in a system of difference which provides the very possibility of their being understood – were applied to the systems of, for example, playing cards, traffic lights and menus, as though these were independent of language. It became increasingly evident, however, that they depend crucially upon language for their intelligibility, not only as a relay of their meaning, but, vitally, to found their very system of difference...
eBook - ePubLinguistic Theory
The Discourse of Fundamental Works
- Robert De Beaugrande(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 2 Ferdinand de Saussure 1 2.1 Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics) is a peculiar book, not merely published but in part composed after the author's death. Since he ‘destroyed the rough drafts of the outlines used for his lectures’, the editors, Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Riedlinger, used ‘the notes collected by students’ in order to ‘attempt a reconstruction, a synthesis’, and to ‘recreate F. de Saussure's thought’ (CG xviiif). To ‘draw together an organic whole’, the editors tried to ‘weed out variations and irregularities characteristic of oral delivery’, and to ‘omit nothing that might contribute to the overall impression’ (CG xix). Thus, the ‘Saussure’ of the Cours is a composite voice, speaking from a lecture platform between 1897 and 1911 and passing through the notebooks of followers who confess that ‘the master’ ‘probably would not have authorized the publication of these pages’ (CG xvii, 38, xviiif). Many problems with its formulation and interpretation may reflect the difficulties of its composition. 2.2 Saussure – or ‘Saussure’, as I should write perhaps – seems fully conscious of his role as founder of a ‘science’. He constantly searches for generalities, high-level abstractions, and fundamental definitions. Over and over, he states what is ‘always’ or ‘never’ the case, what applies in ‘each’ or ‘every’ instance, what are the ‘only’ relevant aspects, and so on. At times, these universalizing assertions may go beyond what can be demonstrated, or conflict with each other in puzzling ways. 2 Formulating the common denominators of Saussurian ‘thought’ can thus be quite challenging. 2.3 His ‘hesitation to undertake the radical revision which he felt was necessary’ in linguistics seems to have deterred him from writing a general book; in fact, ‘he could not bring himself to publish the slightest note if he was not assured first of the fundamental foundations’ (Benveniste 1971: 33)...
