Ferdinand de Saussure - Course in General Linguistics

Course in General Linguistics

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Course in General Linguistics

Ferdinand de Saussure

Translated and annotated by Roy Harris
With a new introduction by Roy Harris

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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This translation first published in 1983 by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.

English Translation and Editorial Matter 1983, 2013 Roy Harris

Bloomsbury Revelations edition first published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Academic

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ePub ISBN: 978-1-4725-0538-5

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Contents

Roy Harris

Saussures Cours de linguistique gnrale occupies a place of unique importance in the history of Western thinking about man in society. It is a key text not only within the development of linguistics but also in the formation of that broader intellectual movement of the twentieth century known as structuralism. With the sole exception of Wittgenstein, no thinker has had as profound an influence on the modern view of homo loquens as Saussure.

The revolution Saussure ushered in has rightly been described as Copernican. For instead of mens words being seen as peripheral to mens understanding of reality, mens understanding of reality came to be seen as revolving about their social use of verbal signs. In the Cours de linguistique gnrale we see this new approach clearly articulated for the first time. Words are not vocal labels which have come to be attached to things and qualities already given in advance by Nature, or to ideas already grasped independently by the human mind. On the contrary languages themselves, collective products of social interaction, supply the essential conceptual frameworks for mens analysis of reality and, simultaneously, the verbal equipment for their description of it. The concepts we use are creations of the language we speak.

Saussures standing as the founder of modern linguistics remains unchallenged more than half a century after his death. It is based on two facts. One fact is that Saussure, although only one among many distinguished linguists of his day, was the first to recognise the particular range of theoretical questions which had to be answered if linguistics was ever to take its place among the sciences. The other fact is that Saussure himself proposed answers to those questions which have remained either the basis or the point of departure for all subsequent linguistic theory within the academic discipline which thereafter claimed the designation linguistics.

This dual achievement suffices to explain Saussures pivotal place in the evolution of language studies. But he plays a no less crucial role when his work is seen in a wider cultural context. For the founder of modern linguistics at the same time founded semiology, the general science of signs, within which linguistics was to be one special branch. In so doing, Saussure opened up a new approach to the study of many other human patterns of behaviour. It was an approach later to be exploited by theorists in such diverse fields as art, architecture, philosophy, literary criticism and social anthropology. The implications of Saussures technique for dealing with linguistic analysis extend far beyond the boundaries of language, in ways which make the Cours de linguistique gnrale without doubt one of the most far-reaching works concerning the study of human cultural activities to have been published at any time since the Renaissance.

* * *

Saussures proposals for the establishment of linguistics as an independent science may at the risk of making them sound rather unexciting be summarised as follows. He rejected the possibility of an all-embracing science of language, which would deal simultaneously with physiological, sociological, philosophical and psychological aspects of the subject. Instead, he proposed to cut through the perplexing maze of existing approaches to the study of linguistic phenomena by setting up a unified discipline, based upon a single, clearly defined concept: that of the linguistic sign. The essential feature of Saussures linguistic sign is that, being intrinsically arbitrary, it can be identified only by contrast with coexisting signs of the same nature, which together constitute a structured system. By taking this position, Saussure placed modern linguistics in the vanguard of twentieth-century structuralism.

It was a position which committed Saussure to drawing a radical distinction between diachronic (or evolutionary) linguistics and synchronic (or static) linguistics, and giving priority to the latter. For words, sounds and constructions connected solely by processes of historical development over the centuries cannot possibly, according to Saussures analysis, enter into structural relations with one another, any more than Napoleons France and Caesars Rome can be structurally united under one and the same political system.

Truism though this may now seem, there is no doubt that in arguing along these lines Saussure was swimming against the prevailing tide in language studies throughout his lifetime. For the great philological achievements of the nineteenth century had all been founded upon a historical and comparativist approach to language. Late-nineteenth-century philology was as uncompromisingly evolutionary in outlook as Darwinian biology. Saussure was the first to question whether the historical study of languages could possibly provide a satisfactory foundation for a science of linguistics. The question was as profound as it was startling: for the assumption most of Saussures contemporaries made was that historical philology already had provided the only possible scientific foundation. They believed, as Max Mller optimistically put it in the 1860s, that linguists were already dealing with the facts of language just as scientifically as the astronomer treats the stars of heaven, or the botanist the flowers of the field. In Saussures view, nothing could have been more profoundly mistaken.