FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE: FOUNDER OF

MODERN LINGUISTICS

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By Nidhi Negi
Introduction:
Ferdinand de Saussure, born on 26 November 1857, was a Swiss linguist. His ideas laid a
foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiology in the 20th
century. 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/semiology.
Saussure had a major impact on the development of linguistic theory in the first half of the
20th century. His two currents of thought emerged independently of each other, one in
Europe, the other in America. The results of each incorporated the basic notions of
Saussure's thought in forming the central tenets of structural linguistics. According to him,
linguistic entities are parts of a system and are defined by their relations to one another
within said system. The thinker used the game of chess for his analogy, citing that the
game is not defined by the physical attributes of the chess pieces but the relation of each
piece to the other pieces.

Major contributions:
Credited with establishing modern linguistics, Saussure was one of the founders of
structuralism. At a very young age, he applied principles of structural analysis to solve a
problem concerning the reconstruction of the Indo-European language family.
Saussure’s great insight was that the relation between sound and meaning is arbitrary and
that all languages are structured in a fundamentally similar fashion. His work had a huge
impact on linguists in Europe and North America.
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.

The origins of structuralism connect with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure on linguistics,
along with the linguistics of the Prague and Moscow schools. In brief, Saussure's structural
linguistics propounded three related concepts.
1. Saussure argued for a distinction between langue (an idealized abstraction of
language) and parole (language as actually used in daily life). He argued that the "sign"
was composed of both a signified, an abstract concept or idea, and a "signifier", the
perceived sound/visual image.
2. Because different languages have different words to describe the same objects or
concepts, there is no intrinsic reason why a specific sign is used to express a given
signifier. It is thus "arbitrary".
3. Signs thus gain their meaning from their relationships and contrasts with other signs.
As he wrote, ‘in language, there are only differences without positive terms’.
In sociology, anthropology, and linguistics, structuralism is the methodology that implies
elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a broader,
overarching system or structure. It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the
things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel. Alternatively, as summarized by
philosopher Simon Blackburn, structuralism is "the belief that phenomena of human life are
not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and
behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract
culture".

Saussure introduced Structuralism in Linguistics, marking a revolutionary break in the study

of language, which had till then been historical and, philological. In his Course in General
Linguistics (1916), Saussure saw language as a system of signs constructed by
convention. Understanding meaning to be relational, being produced by the interaction
between various signifiers and signifieds, he held that meaning cannot be understood in
isolation. Saussure illustrated this relationality of language, with the terms paradigmatic
axis (of selection) and the syntagmatic axis (of combination). Further, he challenged the
view of reality as independent and existing outside language and reduced tang cage to a
mere “naming system”. He questioned the conventional “correspondence theory of
meaning” and argued that meaning is arbitrary, and that language does not merely reflect
the world but constitutes it.

The Binary Oppositions

Saussure’s theory is based on binary oppositions or dyads’, i.e., defining a unit in terms of
what it is not, which give rise to oppositional pairs in which one is always superior to the
other. The most fundamental binary opposition is related to the concept of sign, the basic
unit of signification. In Saussure, the previously undivided sign gets divided into the signifier
(the sound image) and the signified (the concept). Saussure stressed that the relationship
between the signifier and the signified is conventional and arbitrary and that both terms are
psychological in nature. There is no one-to-one relation between the signifier and the
signified. For instance, the sound image “tree” may refer to different kinds of trees or it may
even be a metaphor for the forest. Therefore, the second binary opposition is that of the
langue and parole, where langue refers to language as a structural system based on
certain rules, while parole refers to an individual expression of language. The terms langue
and parole are parallel to the terms competence and performance formulated by Chomsky.
The binary opposition of synchronic and diachronic refers to the study of the structure and
functions of language at a particular point of time, and over a period of time respectively.
Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic axes refer to the axes of selection and combination
respectively, where syntagmatic denotes the relationship of units/words in a linear pattern,
while ‘paradigmatic, axis constitutes of the interchangeable units in a language. It is
inferred that meaning is arbitrary and unstable.
For example, Saussure uses ‘tree’ as an example, with the Latin ‘arbor’. Saussure’s theory
states that the sound-image, the ‘arbor’ is arbitrary – without the concept, it doesn’t work.
This is valid when looking at different languages; to a non-Latin speaker, ‘arbor’ means
nothing. Combined with the concept, an image of a tree, or a tree in front of you, it
becomes a sign. The point he is making is that language itself is actually arbitrary; it is the
associations or concepts we assign to words that hold the meaning, the signs. Without
these meanings, words would represent nothing.

Legacy
Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics proved to be of seminal influence in various fields
such as Anthropology (Levi-Strauss), Semiology (Roland Barthes), the literary and
philosophical concepts of Derrida, Marxist analysis of ideology by Althusser,
psychoanalytical theories of Lacan, and analysis of language conducted by Feminists like
Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray.
Saussure's status in contemporary theoretical linguistics, however, is much diminished,
with many key positions now dated or subject to challenge, but post-structuralist 21st-
century reception remains more open to Saussure's influence. His main contribution to
structuralism 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. His idea was that all myths
have an underlying pattern, which forms the structure that makes them myths. These
established the structuralist framework to literary criticism.

By Nidhi Negi
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