X Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2018

1. Saussure’s Life

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was a young man holding no academic degree when he set out to reform the conceptual and methodological basis of linguistics. His early attempt was partly successful, insofar as the historical study of the Indo-European languages was concerned, but his wider ambitions would take much longer to realize. Only after his death did a book based on his lectures on general linguistics set the agenda for the analysis of language in the 20th century and beyond.

Saussure was born in Geneva on November 26, 1857, the first of the nine children of Henri de Saussure and Countess Louise de Pourtalès. The Saussures were a noble Calvinist family who had fled persecution in the Lorraine region of France in the 15th century and settled in Geneva’s Upper Town. Ferdinand’s great-grandfather, Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, became a famous scientist, one of the founders of modern geology. Of Horace-Bénédict’s three children, two became scholars of considerable stature. Adrienne Necker de Saussure wrote a widely read biography of her cousin by marriage, the novelist Germaine de Staël, and an influential study of progressive education that includes a chapter on children’s acquisition of language. Nicolas-Théodore de Saussure is remembered for important contributions to organic chemistry, including being the first to determine the precise chemistry of photosynthesis.

Returning to Geneva in 1870, Ferdinand, then twelve, entered the private École Martine, and went on in 1872 to the public Collège de Genève. After that, he progressed to the Gymnase de Genève and finally the Université de Genève, where he began his formal study of linguistics under the tutelage of Louis Morel, recently returned from his own studies at the University of Leipzig. It was to Leipzig that Ferdinand himself headed in 1876, shortly before his 19th birthday. Leipzig linguistics was in ferment at the time, with Hermann Osthoff and Karl Brugmann, both of whom would be among Saussure’s teachers, laying the ground for the neogrammatische Richtung, the manifesto of which they would jointly sign in 1878.

Abandoning his plans for a French degree, Saussure continued teaching at the École Pratique des Hautes Études until 1889, when he took a year’s leave and returned to Geneva, intending to complete his study of Lithuanian intonation and its wider implications. This leave coincided with a series of personal crises and disappointments. His mother’s nervous state had given way; his hopes for becoming engaged to a wealthy Parisian cousin were dashed; and he failed to be considered for either of the two chairs of Sanskrit that had recently fallen vacant. His time in Geneva did not produce a completed work for publication, and he returned to Paris for the academic year 1890–1891. But then, he decided to go back permanently to the Université de Genève, where a chair in Sanskrit and the history and comparison of the Indo-European languages was created for him.

In 1892 he married his cousin Marie Faesch, and nine months later they had their first son, Jacques. Two more sons, Raymond and André, followed in 1894 and 1895, though André succumbed to cholera three months later. In 1894 Saussure was one of the two main organizers of the Tenth International Congress of Orientalists in Geneva, where he gave a paper, enunciating what would become known as Saussure’s Law, which is discussed in the next section. Apart from his articles on Lithuanian, he published little of lasting importance for linguistics for the remainder of his life, which ended on February 22, 1913, apparently from influenza, which still today, even with modern antibiotics, can be fatal to those suffering, as Saussure did, from chronic arteriosclerosis.

2. The Courses in General Linguistics

The book for which Saussure became most famous, the Cours de linguistique générale, was put together by his Geneva colleagues Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye mainly using the notes of students, supplemented by some manuscript notes of Saussure’s, from the three general linguistics courses he gave in 1907, 1908–1909, and 1910–1911. In the autumn of 1906, Joseph Wertheimer, who had given a course in general linguistics at the Université de Genève since before Saussure himself was a student there (a course Saussure declined to take), fell gravely ill and was compelled to retire from teaching. Normally, the University would have replaced him with a new professor, but this was a period of austerity, and the University had in Saussure a renowned linguist whose courses in Sanskrit and occasionally other subjects attracted very few students. Saussure, who was also acting as librarian for the Arts Faculty, agreed to take responsibility for the general linguistics course starting in January 1907. He was not completely comfortable with it, recalling his vain efforts to write a book on the subject over his entire adult life, and knowing that this course was aimed at students whose background in Sanskrit or Latin or any other specific language was not strong enough for them to do the sort of in-depth textual study that Saussure considered the only real way to gain a comprehension of how language works. He knew that the course would need to start from scratch, questioning the meaning of such basic terms as langue, language, parole, all used more or less interchangeably in colloquial French to indicate language in general, a particular language, a text, an utterance, a word.

His first course was a good start but left him dissatisfied. Before the second run in 1908–1909, he rethought it from the ground up. Here and in the third course, Saussure completed his description of a language as a system whose every element is attached to every other element, and where the content of an element is purely a value generated by its difference vis-à-vis every other element. It is a model of such modernist elegance that we linguists today still have trouble accepting it with all that it entails. The following subsections sketch the features of Saussure’s approach that would prove most influential.

2.1 The Distinction Between Langue and Parole

A language, une langue, is the virtual system possessed by all those who form part of the same speech community that makes it possible for them to understand and be understood by other members of that community. La parole is the utterances, the texts, that individuals produce and understand making use of the system that is la langue. In addition, when Saussure refers to the language faculty that all people possess, as distinct from the particular langues they speak, he sometimes calls this the faculté de langage; but there is not a consistent three-way division of langue-parole-langage, particularly because he sometimes uses la langue to mean language generally, as a pan-human attribute.

2.2 Language as a System of Signs

A langue is a system of signs in which each sign is the conjunction of two values, both entirely mental (psychological), which he sometimes calls a concept and an acoustic image. However, these terms can mislead readers into thinking of them as visual images, when they are meant to be pure values. Other linguists of the time generally conceived of languages as a way of denoting things and actions. Saussure argued that it is not things, but our conception of things, actions, and ideas, that are part of our language; not names, but schemas in the brain capable of being evoked by certain combinations of sounds. In one of his last lectures he introduced the terms signifiant ‘signifier’ for the acoustic image and signifié ‘signified’ for the concept. He avoided neologism in general, but this appeared to be the best way around the temptation to imagine, for example, the signifié corresponding to sheep as either a physical animal or a mental image of such an animal, rather than as a value generated by its difference from lamb, goat, ewe, mutton, and so on.

Detailed inquiry into the sign was undertaken only in Saussure’s third and last course, specifically in its second half. From here derives the bulk of the material on the sign in the published Cours.

2.3 Value

Each signifier and each signified is a value produced by the difference between it and all the other signifiers and signifieds in the system. It is not the sound as such that signifies; there is, after all, much variation in the pronunciation of all speech sounds. The French /r/, for example, exhibits wide phonetic variation; indeed, analysis of recordings show subtle differences in every utterance of the “same” sound. But if when saying the word roi ‘king’ a speaker produces Standard French /ʁwa/, or /rwa/ with a rolled r, or /Rwa/ with the Parisian working-class guttural r (as on records by Édith Piaf), the same signifier is perceived, so long as it is distinct from moi ‘me’, doigt ‘finger’ or any other word.

Likewise with the signified: if an animal of a certain species comes into view a French speaker would exclaim Un mouton!, and an English speaker A sheep!. But the linguistic values of mouton and sheep are different. The signified of mouton includes the whole animal or some of its meat, whereas the signified of sheep covers only the animal on the hoof. Its meat is mutton, an entirely different sign. This means that the signified belongs to a particular language just as much as does the signifier. The world we experience with its categories of animals, things, colours and so on—does not exist before language. The signifier and the signified are created together, with the particular segmentations that distinguish one language from another, one culture from another.

The idea of value generated by difference was raised late in the first course, in the context of a discussion of historical reconstruction, acquired more significance in the second course as part of its opening discussion of the linguistic sign. It became the climax of the third course, whence the following passage from the Cours is taken:

“in a language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, the language contains neither ideas nor sounds that pre-exist the linguistic system, but only conceptual differences and phonic differences issuing from this system”

(Cours p. 166, my translation).

However, the conjunction of signifier and signified is a sign which is of a positive order, and is concrete rather than abstract. The third course also looks in detail at just how the oppositions within the system are structured. Every word or term or unit within the system is connected to an entourage of other units, related to it either syntagmatically (i.e., the units that can come before or after it in an utterance) or associatively (i.e., the units with which it has something in common in form or meaning). The relationships of difference in these two domains generate the value of the unit. Ultimately, then, no linguistic sign exists in isolation.

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