Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), Swiss linguist, born in Geneva. He attended science classes for a year at the University of Geneva before turning to language studies at Leipzig in 1876. He published the major work of his lifetime, his Mémoire (on the Proto-Indo-European vowel system) in 1879. His early work was on philology, and he became a professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Grammar at the University of Geneva in 1891.

He is chiefly regarded for his Cours de Linguistique Générale (1916, trans. 1959) constructed by some of his students from his lecture notes and other materials after his death. For this he is sometimes called “the father of Structuralism”: he made explicit the implications of a structuralist approach to language. He made a series of theoretical distinctions that became the foundation of Structuralism and semiotics, for example between langue (the system of a given language), parole (the speech of one speaker of that language), and langage (the capacity humans have to speak and understand language in general); the syntagmatic (linearly sequential) and paradigmatic (associative) dimensions in linguistics; diachrony (a historical approach to studying linguistics) and synchrony (an approach to linguistics that singles out certain periods in time); and the difference between signifiant and signifié in the study of semantics. His work also has important consequences outside mainstream linguistics, such as in anthropology, history, and literary criticism.