'A GENERAL SCIENCE OF SIGNS'
THE ORIGINS OF STRUCTURALISM
BY THE FATHER OF MODERN LINGUIST
SAUSSURE, Ferdinand de.
Cours de linguistique générale.
Lausanne & Paris, Payot, 1916.
8vo, pp. 336, [2 (errata, blank)]; German bibliographical note to head of half-title ‘vgl. Sechehaye … 44, 217–241, L’ecole genevoise de linguistique générale. Schuchardt, L. Bl. 1917, 1–9’; another to first leaf of preface, making reference to Schuchardt and C. Herman, a few pencil underlinings and annotations, mild browning; a good copy in the original printed paper wrappers, edges and joints a little worn, spine split but holding, small loss to foot of spine; signatures ‘F. ?Muller’ to upper wrapper and first blank, preserved in a cloth box with leather label.
First edition of this seminal textbook on linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure, fundamental to the development of structuralism and semiotics, introducing distinctions between signified and signifier as well as language systems and speech.
The text of the Cours de linguistique générale was prepared by two of Saussure’s pupils, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, from his lectures at the University of Geneva (1907–11) and published posthumously. In a distinct step away from nineteenth-century linguistics, which had been rooted primarily in philology, Saussure insisted that language is a system which can be viewed under two aspects, diachronic and synchronic. Diachrony is the mode under which the system of language evolves through time, and hence includes not only philology but also the more modern discipline of lexico-statistics, or glottochronology. Synchrony, conversely, is the mode in which a given language system exists at a single time, independently of its history; it represents a cross-section, as it were, of its diachronic development, and it is under this aspect that structuralism has developed its study of language. Other distinctions made by Saussure, of which the influence on structuralism cannot be overstressed, are those between langue, langage, and parole, and signifiant and signifié.
Saussure’s call for a ‘general science of signs’, for which he coined the term ‘semiology’ (the cognate term ‘semiotics’ is associated mainly with the American tradition, in which writers like Peirce and Morris were developing similar ideas independently of Saussure) has been hugely influential outside the realm of linguistics. This general science of signs came to encompass the work of many disciplines, perhaps most notably anthropology, where Levi-Strauss began to view anthropological data as forming a system in which each part helps determine the significance of the others.
En français dans le texte 346.
