Ferdinand de Saussure ‘s Contributions
Ferdinand de Saussure (November 26,
1857 – February 22, 1913) was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid the foundation
for many of the significant developments in linguistics in the twentieth
century. He is widely considered the "father" of twentieth-century
linguistics, and his work laid the foundation for the approach known as
structuralism in the broader field of the social sciences. Although his work
established the essential framework of future studies, his ideas contained many
limitations and fundamental weaknesses as later scholars recognized that
underlying structure and rules, while informative, cannot be the sole
determinant of meaning and value in any social system.
Biography
Born in Geneva , Switzerland University of Geneva Leipzig
in 1876 to study linguistics.
Two years later at the age of 21,
Saussure studied for a year in BerlinHe returned to Leipzig and was awarded his doctorate in
1880. Soon afterwards he relocated to Paris ,
where he would lecture on ancient and modern languages for eleven years before
returning to Geneva
in 1891.
Living in Geneva , teaching Sanskrit and historical
linguistics, he married there and had two sons. Saussure continued to lecture
at the university for the remainder of his life. However, it was not until 1906
that Saussure began teaching the course of "General Linguistics" that
would consume the greater part of his attention until his death in 1913.
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Contributions to linguistics
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Laryngeal theory
While a student, Saussure published an important work in
Indo-European philology that proposed the existence of a class of sounds in
Proto-Indo-European called laryngeals, outlining what is now known as the
"laryngeal theory." It has been argued that the problem he
encountered, namely trying to explain how he was able to make systematic and
predictive hypotheses from known linguistic data to unknown linguistic data,
stimulated him to develop structuralism.
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The Course of General Linguistics (Cours de
linguistique générale)
Saussure's most influential work, the Cours de linguistique
générale (Course of General Linguistics), was published posthumously in 1916 by
former students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye on the basis of notes taken
from Saussure's lectures at the University of Geneva. The Cours became one of
the seminal linguistics works of the twentieth century, not primarily for the
content (many of the ideas had been anticipated in the works of other
nineteenth-century linguists), but rather for the innovative approach that
Saussure applied in discussing linguistic phenomena.
Saussure made what became a famous distinction between
langue (language) and parole (speech). Language, for Saussure, is the symbolic
system through which we communicate. Speech refers to actual utterances. Since
we can communicate an infinite number of utterances, it is the system behind
them that is important. In separating language from speaking, we are at the
same time separating: (1) what is social from what is individual; and (2) what
is essential from what is accessory and more or less accidental.
Saussure illustrated this with
reference to a chess game. The chess game has its rules and its pieces and its
board. These define the game, which can then be played in an effectively
limitless number of ways by an infinite number of pairs of players. Any
particular game of chess is of interest only to the participants. Thus in
linguistics, while we may collect our data from actual instances of speech, the
goal is to work back to the system of rules and words that organize the speech.
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revolutionary element in Saussure's work
The most revolutionary element in
Saussure's work is his insistence that languages do not produce different versions of the same
reality, they in effect produce different realities. That different languages
conceptualize the world in significantly different ways is demonstrated by the
fact that even such "physical" or "natural" phenomena as
colors are not the same in different languages. Russian does not have a term
for blue. The words poluboi and sinij, which are usually translated as
"light blue" and "dark blue," refer to what are in Russian
distinct colors, not different shades of the same color. The English word
"brown" has no equivalent in French. It is translated into brun,
marron, or even jeune depending on the context. In Welsh, the color glas,
though often translated as "blue," contains elements that English
would identify as "green" or "grey." Because the boundaries
are placed differently in the two languages the Welsh equivalent of the English
"grey" might be glas or llwyd.
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Semiotics
Saussure is one of the founding fathers of semiotics. His
concept of the sign/signifier/signified/referent forms the core of the field.
Equally crucial, although often overlooked or misapplied, is the dimension of
the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axis of linguistic description.
In Saussure’s theory, language is
mostly the means of social communication with the help of “signs,” where the
linguistic sign—a word—makes and defines the relationship between the acoustic
image of the set of sounds or “signifier” (for instance: f, a, m, i, l, y ) and
the actual image (or “signified”) of a “family” in our consciousness. This
relationship, the bond between the signifier and signified, is both arbitrary
and necessary.
The principle of arbitrariness
dominates all ideas about the structure of language. It makes it possible to
separate the signifier and signified, or to change the relationship between
them. The set of acoustic sounds, i.e. “signifier” (f, a, m, i, l, y), evokes
just the image of the object, “family” (always, necessarily and also,
strictly). In Saussure's linguistics, there is no place for any socially charged
nuance or sensual addition that the word “family” might otherwise evoke. This
strictly one-to-one correspondence, therefore, often came under criticism by
literary or comparative linguists such as Vaclav while working with the
concepts of aesthetics.
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Critiques of Saussure’s linguistic theories
The following quotes from Saussure’s
main work, Course in General Linguistics, illustrate some of his theories,
particularly vis-a-vis real-life social organizations:
Some people regard language…as a naming process only…. This
conception is open to criticism on several points. It assumes that ready-made
ideas exist before words…finally, it lets us assume that the linking of a name
and a thing is a very simple operation… (p. 65).
Without language thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There
are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of
language… (p. 112).
Linguistics then works in the borderland where the elements
of sound and thought combine; their combination produces a form, not a
substance…. The arbitrary nature of the sign explains why the social fact alone
can create a linguistic system. The community is necessary if values that owe
their existence solely to usage and general acceptance are to be set up; by
himself, the individual is incapable of fixing a single value… (p. 113).
It could also be argued that language usage is not (even in
Saussure) a simple effect of la langue: the system is not changed by the
individual usage as such, but through the community, which the language as an
institution helps to form.
However, this concept of social praxis, which becomes
crucial if one wants to understand the proper establishment and change of the
language system, is missing in Saussure. Social praxis is a part of the larger
reality that language is embedded in, but which structuralism seldom deals with
in its methodological closure around the always already existing structure.
Some critics (see Bouissac 2003), perhaps without
sufficiently detailed study of Saussure’s work, added a new dimension to the
debate, further reinforcing the stereotype of a Saussurian doctrine which they
contended had overlooked the social, processual, transformational, and
fundamentally temporal nature of languages and cultures. Thus, in their eyes,
Saussure's approach appeared to study the system only
"synchronically," as if it was frozen in time (like a photograph),
rather than also "diachronically," in terms of its evolution over
time (like a film).
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Legacy/The impact of Saussure's ideas
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The impact of Saussure's ideas
The impact of Saussure's ideas on the development of
linguistic theory in the first half of the twentieth century cannot be
understated. Two currents of thought emerged independently of each other, one
in Europe, and the other in America .
The results of each incorporated the basic notions of Saussurian thought in
forming the central tenets of structural linguistics.
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linguistic form is arbitrary
Saussure posited that linguistic form is arbitrary, and
therefore all languages function in a similar fashion. According to Saussure, a
language is arbitrary because it is systematic in that the whole is greater
than the sum of its parts. Also, all languages have their own concepts and
sound images (or signifieds and signifiers). Therefore, Saussure argues,
languages have a relational conception of their elements: words and their
meanings are defined by comparing and contrasting their meanings to one
another. For instance, the sound images for and the conception of a book differ
from the sound images for and the conception of a table. Languages are also
arbitrary because of the nature of their linguistic elements: they are defined
in terms of their function rather than in terms of their inherent qualities.
Finally, he posits, language has a social nature in that it provides a larger
context for analysis, determination and realization of its structure.
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the Prague
In Europe, the most important work in this period of
influence was done by the Prague
school. Most notably, Nikolay Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson headed the efforts
of the Prague School Copenhagen
School
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systemic functional linguistics
In America ,
Saussure's ideas informed the distributionalism of Leonard Bloomfield[13] and
the post-Bloomfieldian structuralism of such scholars as Eugene Nida, Bernard
Bloch, George L. Trager, Rulon S. Wells III, Charles Hockett, and through
Zellig Harris the young Noam Chomsky. In addition to Chomsky's theory of
Transformational grammar, other contemporary developments of structuralism
included Kenneth Pike's theory of tagmemics, Sidney Lamb's theory of
stratificational grammar, and Michael Silverstein's work. Systemic functional
linguistics is a theory considered to be based firmly on the Saussurean
principles of the sign, albeit it some modifications. Ruqaiya Hasan describes
systemic functional linguistics as a 'post-Saussurean' linguistic theory.[1
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structuralism
Outside linguistics, the principles and methods employed by
structuralism were soon adopted by scholars and literary critics, such as
Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and implemented in
their respective areas of study. However, their expansive interpretations of
Saussure's theories, and their application of those theories to non-linguistic
fields of study, led to theoretical difficulties and proclamations of the end
of structuralism in those disciplines. This alone clearly underscores the fact
that Saussure was no philosopher, only a ground-breaking theoretical linguist
whose ideas could be summed up in a few words.
The differences we readily experience as independent of
language are in fact constructed by it. This does not mean that language
creates "actuality" (that is, trees, rocks, buildings, and people)
but that language turns undifferentiated, meaningless nature into a
differentiated, meaningful, cultural reality. The most significant feature of
Saussure's work is the argument that language precedes experience. We have no
direct access to the world; our relationship to it is always mediated by, and
dependent on, language.
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Conclusion
Thus, his position emphasized the role of language to the
expense of all other human faculties, individual and social, and did not
address the origin of the meanings and cultural values that are communicated
through the medium of language. Nevertheless, Saussure's work formed the
foundation upon which the field could develop.
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