Continental · 1857–1913
Ferdinand de Saussure
Geneva linguist whose lectures founded structural linguistics
Saussure treated language as a system of signs whose meanings come from their differences, with an arbitrary link between sound and concept, and proposed a general science of signs, semiology. His Course was compiled by students after his death.
Life and thought
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was born in Geneva and made his name at 21 with a brilliant study of the vowel system of Indo-European. After teaching in Paris he returned to Geneva, where between 1907 and 1911 he gave three courses on general linguistics. He published almost nothing from them: the Course in General Linguistics (1916) was reconstructed after his death by his colleagues Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye from students’ notes.
Saussure separated language as a system (langue) from individual acts of speaking (parole), and studied the system as it stands at one moment rather than its history. A sign joins a sound-image (the signifier) to a concept (the signified), and the link is arbitrary: nothing in the sound “tree” resembles a tree. So a sign means what it does only through its differences from the other signs in the system. This idea, that meaning lies in relations rather than in things, became the founding principle of structuralism.