Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose Geneva lectures on general linguistics, compiled and published posthumously by his students in 1916 as the Course in General Linguistics, founded structural linguistics. He argued that language should be studied as a self-contained system of signs defined by their relations to one another rather than by their history, distinguished the abstract system of a language, langue, from its use in actual speech, parole, and proposed that the link between a word's sound and its meaning is arbitrary rather than natural. These ideas shaped not only twentieth-century linguistics but structuralist thought across anthropology, literary theory and semiotics more broadly.
Facts
RoleLinguist, Founder of Structural Linguistics 2 Connections
Associated With
Source Memoire sur le systeme primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-europeennesFerdinand de Saussure
Influenced
Meillet studied under Saussure and carried his structural approach into Indo-European comparative linguistics.
Source Wikipedia: Antoine Meillet
Kurylowicz 1927 identification of Hittite h with sounds Saussure had posited on purely internal evidence in 1878 confirmed Saussure laryngeal theory.
Hjelmslev glossematics radicalized Saussure structural distinction between langue and parole into a fully formal theory of language.
Jakobson's structural-functional theory of phonology was built on Saussurean hypotheses.
Source Wikipedia: Ferdinand de Saussure
Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica
Nationality, Ferdinand de Saussure entity pageQuote, Nationality, Ferdinand de Saussure entity page
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose Geneva lectures on general linguistics, compiled and published posthumously by his students in 1916 as the Course in General Linguistics, founded structural linguistics.
2. Course in General Linguistics
Ferdinand de Saussure, 1916
Memoire sur le systeme primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-europeennes
Ferdinand de Saussure, 1878Associated With: Indo-European
Wikipedia: Antoine Meillet
Wikipedia: Ferdinand de Saussure
Wikimedia FoundationInfluenced: Roman Jakobson, Structuralism and the Prague School sectionQuote, Influenced: Roman Jakobson, Structuralism and the Prague School section
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.
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