Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)

Ferdinand de Saussure was a linguist and semiotician born in Geneva,

Switzerland. At 15 he was already a polyglot (being familiar with French, German,
English, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit) and was already attempting to develop a
‘general system of language.” By the age of 21 he had already published a book on
the vowel system in Indo-European languages. Saussure delivered the course on
general linguistics three times in 1907, 1909 and 1911. He never published
anything on the subject because he always felt that his work was too tentative and
he hadn't found a solid ground worthy of publishing. But after his death in 1913, a
group of students and colleagues of Saussure's took their notes on his course and
compiled them into a book called Course on General Linguistics.
This work ended up being highly influential in the 20th century in the development
of semiotics as well as structuralism and post-structuralism through which it
influenced everything from anthropology and sociology to psychoanalysis and
literary theory.
Diachronic vs Synchronic
First of all, it must be said that at that time the study of languages was
commonly called philology and it was a study of the development of languages
rather than looking at living language.
And Saussure was the first one, who drew a distinction between two ways of
studying language that he called diachronic and synchronic. Diachronic is the
study of evolution of language through time. Synchronic is the study of
language at a moment without any consideration of its history or evolution. This
diachronic synchronic distinction is Saussure's first boundary marker for
semiotics. It's basically stating that this new science of linguistics is separate to
the historical linguistics that is being done everywhere else. Semiotics is to
explore the language itself at a moment in time.
Langue vs Parole
The next boundary marker is the distinction between langue and parole. These
are two French words for language. Lange is the equivalent of the English word
tongue. Like the English word this captures the sense of articulate language
while also being the word for the organ of language. The other word is parole
which is usually translated in English as speech.
Lange is the entirety of the structure of the language while parole is the
language as we speak it. With parole we make the language concrete. We are
using it in the flow of conversation, bringing the langue to life. Langue is the
abstract structure which is always behind parole and which parole draws upon.
Langue is social. It is never contained completely in one individual. There will
be words you know of that I don’t and there will be words that I know that you
don’t. Sometimes we might even use the language improperly. This is all part of
the incomplete instantiation of langue in the everyday parole. And Semiotics is
to be the science of langue, of this abstract structure of language.
Signs, Signifiers and Signifieds
Saussure was interested in the system of signs we use to communicate our ideas
and gave the definition of the Fundamental Linguistic Unit. He calls this unit
the sign and there are two sides to it that he calls the signifier and the signified.
The signifier is the sensible aspect of the sign. In speech it is the sound of the
word, in writing it is the marks on the page and in sign language it is physical
gestures and expressions.
But these signifiers don’t just have to be linguistic. Street signs or traffic lights
are examples of signifiers that don’t use words to signify. So the signifier is the
word, sign or symbol that points us in a certain direction.
The signifier points us to the signified. So when you use the word tree that
signifier points me towards the signified, which is my mental concept of tree.
This idea of the signified becomes clearer when contrasted with what Saussure
calls the referent. The referent is the objective thing that we are speaking about.
So if we take the example of a tree then you’ve got the signifier in the word tree.
This signifier points you to the signified, in this case the mental concept of a
tree and together these form the sign.