Ferdinand de Saussure facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Ferdinand de Saussure
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| Born | 26 November 1857 Geneva, Switzerland
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| Died | 22 February 1913 (aged 55) Vufflens-le-Château, Vaud, Switzerland
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| Alma mater | University of Geneva Leipzig University (PhD, 1880) University of Berlin |
| Era | 19th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Structuralism, linguistic turn, semiotics |
| Institutions | EPHE University of Geneva |
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Main interests
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Linguistics |
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Notable ideas
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Structural linguistics Semiology Langue and parole Signified and signifier Synchrony and diachrony Linguistic sign Semiotic arbitrariness Laryngeal theory |
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Influenced
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Ferdinand de Saussure ( 26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders (together with Charles Sanders Peirce) of semiotics, or semiology, as Saussure called it.
Contents
Biography
Saussure was born in Geneva in 1857. His father, Henri Louis Frédéric de Saussure, was a mineralogist, entomologist, and taxonomist. Saussure showed signs of considerable talent and intellectual ability as early as the age of fourteen. In the autumn of 1870, he began attending the Institution Martine (previously the Institution Lecoultre until 1969), in Geneva. There he lived with the family of a classmate, Elie David. Graduating at the top of class, Saussure expected to continue his studies at the Gymnase de Genève, but his father decided he was not mature enough at fourteen and a half, and sent him to the Collège de Genève instead. Saussure was not pleased, as he complained: "I entered the Collège de Genève, to waste a year there as completely as a year can be wasted."
After a year of studying Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit and taking a variety of courses at the University of Geneva, he commenced graduate work at the University of Leipzig in 1876.
Two years later, at 21, Saussure published a book entitled Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (Dissertation on the Primitive Vowel System in Indo-European Languages). After this he studied for a year at the University of Berlin under the Privatdozent Heinrich Zimmer, with whom he studied Celtic, and Hermann Oldenberg with whom he continued his studies of Sanskrit. He returned to Leipzig to defend his doctoral dissertation De l'emploi du génitif absolu en Sanscrit, and was awarded his doctorate in February 1880. Soon, he relocated to the University of Paris, where he lectured on Sanskrit, Gothic and Old High German and occasionally other subjects.
Ferdinand de Saussure is one of the world’s most quoted linguists, which is remarkable as he himself hardly published anything during his lifetime. Even his few scientific articles are not unproblematic. Thus, for example, his publication on Lithuanian phonetics is mostly taken from studies by the Lithuanian researcher Friedrich Kurschat, with whom Saussure traveled through Lithuania in August 1880 for two weeks and whose (German) books Saussure had read. Saussure, who had studied some basic grammar of Lithuanian in Leipzig for one semester but was unable to speak the language, was thus dependent on Kurschat.
Saussure taught at the École pratique des hautes études for eleven years during which he was named Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor). When offered a professorship in Geneva in 1892, he returned to Switzerland. Saussure lectured on Sanskrit and Indo-European at the University of Geneva for the remainder of his life. It was not until 1907 that Saussure began teaching the Course of General Linguistics, which he would offer three times, ending in the summer of 1911. He died in 1913 in Vufflens-le-Château, Vaud, Switzerland. His brothers were the linguist and Esperantist René de Saussure, and scholar of ancient Chinese astronomy, Léopold de Saussure. His son Raymond de Saussure was a psychoanalyst.
Saussure attempted, at various times in the 1880s and 1890s, to write a book on general linguistic matters. His lectures about important principles of language description in Geneva between 1907 and 1911 were collected and published by his pupils posthumously in the famous Cours de linguistique générale in 1916. Work published in his lifetime includes two monographs and a few dozen of papers and notes, all of them collected in a volume of some 600 pages published in 1922. Saussure did not publish anything of his work on ancient poetics even though he had filled more than of a hundred notebooks. Jean Starobinski edited and presented material from them in the 1970s and more has been published since then. Some of his manuscripts, including an unfinished essay discovered in 1996, were published in Writings in General Linguistics, but most of the material in it had already been published in Engler's critical edition of the Course, in 1967 and 1974. Today it is clear that Cours owes much to its so-called editors Charles Bally and Albert Sèchehaye and various details are difficult to track to Saussure himself or his manuscripts.
Work and influence
Saussure's work had a major impact on the development of linguistic theory in the first half of the 20th century. His main contribution was his theory of a two-tiered reality about language. The first is the langue, the abstract and invisible layer, while the second, the parole, refers to the actual speech that we hear in real life. This framework was later adopted by Claude Levi-Strauss, who used the two-tiered model to determine the reality of myths.
Course in General Linguistics
Saussure's most influential work, Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique générale), was published posthumously in 1916 by former students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, on the basis of notes taken from Saussure's lectures in Geneva. The Course became one of the most important linguistics works of the 20th century for the innovative approach that Saussure applied.
Influence outside linguistics
The principles and methods employed by structuralism were later adapted in diverse fields by French intellectuals such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Such scholars took influence from Saussure's ideas in their own areas of study (literary studies/philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, respectively).
View of language
Perhaps the most famous of Saussure's ideas is the distinction between language and speech (Fr. langue et parole).
Saussure approaches theory of language from two different perspectives. On the one hand, language is a system of signs. That is, a semiotic system; or a semiological system as he himself calls it. On the other hand, a language is also a social phenomenon: a product of the language community. When at least two people are engaged in conversation, there forms a communicative circuit between the minds of the individual speakers. Saussure explains that language, as a social system, is neither situated in speech nor in the mind. It only properly exists between the two within the loop. It is located in – and is the product of – the collective mind of the linguistic group. An individual has to learn the normative rules of language and can never control them.
The speech circuit
Perhaps the most famous of Saussure's ideas is the distinction between language and speech (Fr. langue et parole). Saussure views 'speech' as individual occurrences of language usage. Langue, on the contrary, is the abstract and invisible layer. Langue et parole constitute two parts of three of Saussure's 'speech circuit' (circuit de parole). The third part is the brain, that is, the mind of the individual member of the language community.
The task of the linguist is to study language by analysing samples of speech. For practical reasons, this is ordinarily the analysis of written texts. The idea that language is studied through texts is by no means revolutionary as it had been the common practice since the beginning of linguistics.
Works
- (1878) Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes [= Dissertation on the Primitive System of Vowels in Indo-European Languages]. Leipzig: Teubner. (online version in Gallica Program, Bibliothèque nationale de France).
- (1881) De l'emploi du génitif absolu en Sanscrit: Thèse pour le doctorat présentée à la Faculté de Philosophie de l'Université de Leipzig [= On the Use of the Genitive Absolute in Sanskrit: Doctoral thesis presented to the Philosophy Department of Leipzig University]. Geneva: Jules-Guillamaume Fick. (online version on the Internet Archive).
- (1916) Cours de linguistique générale, eds. Charles Bally & Albert Sechehaye, with the assistance of Albert Riedlinger. Lausanne – Paris: Payot.
- 1st trans.: Wade Baskin, trans. Course in General Linguistics. New York: The Philosophical Society, 1959; subsequently edited by Perry Meisel & Haun Saussy, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011.
- 2nd trans.: Roy Harris, trans. Course in General Linguistics. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1983.
- (1922) Recueil des publications scientifiques de F. de Saussure. Eds. Charles Bally & Léopold Gautier. Lausanne – Geneva: Payot.
- (1993) Saussure’s Third Course of Lectures in General Linguistics (1910–1911) from the Notebooks of Emile Constantin. (Language and Communication series, vol. 12). French text edited by Eisuke Komatsu & trans. by Roy Harris. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
- (1995) Phonétique: Il manoscritto di Harvard Houghton Library bMS Fr 266 (8). Ed. Maria Pia Marchese. Padova: Unipress, 1995.
- (2002) Écrits de linguistique générale. Eds. Simon Bouquet & Rudolf Engler. Paris: Gallimard. ISBN: 978-2-07-076116-6.
- Trans.: Carol Sanders & Matthew Pires, trans. Writings in General Linguistics. NY: Oxford University Press, 2006.
- This volume, which consists mostly of material previously published by Rudolf Engler, includes an attempt at reconstructing a text from a set of Saussure's manuscript pages headed "The Double Essence of Language", found in 1996 in Geneva. These pages contain ideas already familiar to Saussure scholars, both from Engler's critical edition of the Course and from another unfinished book manuscript of Saussure's, published in 1995 by Maria Pia Marchese.
- (2013) Anagrammes homériques. Ed. Pierre-Yves Testenoire. Limoges: Lambert Lucas.
- (2014) Une vie en lettres 1866 – 1913. Ed. Claudia Mejía Quijano. ed. Nouvelles Cécile Defaut.
See also
In Spanish: Ferdinand de Saussure para niños
