Background
Ferdinand de Saussure was born on November 26, 1857 in Geneva, Switzerland. He was the son of Henri Louis Frédéric de Saussure, a mineralogist, entomologist, and taxonomist. He had two brothers.
Geneva, Switzerland
Ferdinand de Saussure attended the University of Geneva from 1875 from 1876.
Leipzig, Saxony, Germany
In 1880 Ferdinand de Saussure received a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Leipzig.
Berlin, Germany
From 1878 to 1879 Ferdinand de Saussure studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
(The Cours de linguistique generale, reconstructed from st...)
The Cours de linguistique generale, reconstructed from students' notes after Saussure's death in 1913, founded modern linguistic theory by breaking the study of language free from a merely historical and comparativist approach. Saussure's new method, now known as Structuralism, has since been applied to such diverse areas as art, architecture, folklore, literary criticism, and philosophy. The Cours de linguistique generale, reconstructed from students' notes after Saussure's death in 1913, founded modern linguistic theory by breaking the study of language free from a merely historical and comparativist approach. Saussure's new method, now known as Structuralism, has since been applied to such diverse areas as art, architecture, folklore, literary criticism, and philosophy.
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1983
Ferdinand de Saussure was born on November 26, 1857 in Geneva, Switzerland. He was the son of Henri Louis Frédéric de Saussure, a mineralogist, entomologist, and taxonomist. He had two brothers.
Ferdinand de Saussure attended the University of Geneva from 1875 from 1876. He studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin from 1878 to 1879. In 1880 he received a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Leipzig.
In 1878 Ferdinand published his first full-length work, the critically acclaimed "Memoire sur le systeme primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-europeennes", in which he examined the use of vowels in Indo-European languages. After completing his dissertation "De I’emploi du genitif absolu en Sanscrit", Saussure moved to Paris, becoming active in the Linguistic Society of Paris and obtaining employment at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes (School of Advanced Studies), where he taught German, Sanskrit, Latin, Persian, and Lithuanian from 1881 to 1891. In 1891 he joined the teaching staff of the University of Geneva as professor of comparative grammar and Indo-European languages and served from 1901 – 1911, and of general linguistics (1907 – 1911). These became the basis for his "Course in General Linguistics".
Soon after his death in 1913, his colleagues Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, appreciating the extraordinary nature of his lectures, began gathering his manuscript notes and the notebooks of his students. From these they fashioned the Cours de linguistique générale (Course in general linguistics), published in 1916. It would become one of the most influential books of the 20th century, not just for linguistics but across many realms of intellectual endeavor. Many previously unpublished texts by Saussure have been appearing in recent years, principally in the volumes of the Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure. Various projects are under way for making photographic reproductions of the manuscript material online.
(The Cours de linguistique generale, reconstructed from st...)
1983(French Edition)
1879(French Edition)
1881(French Edition)
1916(French Edition)
1922Ferdinand de Saussure contended that language must be considered as a social phenomenon, a structured system that can be viewed "synchronically", as it exists at any particular time and "diachronically", as it changes in the course of time. He thus formalized the basic approaches to language study and asserted that the principles and methodology of each approach are distinct and mutually exclusive. According to Saussure, "Synchronic linguistics will be concerned with the logical and psychological relations that bind together co-existing terms and form a system in the collective mind of speakers." While diachronic linguistics deals with the evolution of a language through time, as a continually changing medium-a never-ending succession of language states.
He also introduced two terms that have become common currency in linguistics: "parole", the speech of the individual person, and "langue", the system underlying speech activity. Langue was considered by Saussure to be the totality of a language, deducible from an examination of the memories of all the language users.
He was really interested in the abstract system of signs. De Saussure characterized signs as a relationship between "signified" and "signifier". Saussure called this relationship a linguistic sign. The sign is the basic unit of communication.
Quotations:
"Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula."
"Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass."
Ferdinand de Saussure was a member of the Linguistic Society of Paris and of the Institut de France.
Ferdinand de Saussure told about himself: "I’m almost never serious, and I’m always too serious. Too deep, too shallow. Too sensitive, too cold hearted. I’m like a collection of paradoxes."
Ferdinand de Saussure had a son, Raymond de Saussure, psychoanalyst.