Ferdinand de Saussure's work is so powerful that it not only redefined modern linguistics, it also opened our minds to new ways of approaching anthropology, literary criticism, and psychoanalysis. Saussure felt that 19th century linguistics avoided hard questions about what language is and how it works. By 1911, he had taught a general linguistics course only three times. Upon his death, however, his students were so inspired by his teachings that they published them as the "Course in General Linguistics."
Saussure For Beginners takes you through this course, points out the unifying principles, and shows how these ideas migrated from linguistics to other subjects.
Ferdinand de Saussure's work is so powerful that it not only redefined modern linguistics, it also opened our minds to new ways of approaching anthropology, literary criticism, and psychoanalysis. Saussure felt that 19th century linguistics avoided hard questions about what language is and how it works. By 1911, he had taught a general linguistics course only three times. Upon his death, however, his students were so inspired by his teachings that they published them as the "Course in General Linguistics."
Saussure For Beginners takes you through this course, points out the unifying principles, and shows how these ideas migrated from linguistics to other subjects.
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Overview
Ferdinand de Saussure's work is so powerful that it not only redefined modern linguistics, it also opened our minds to new ways of approaching anthropology, literary criticism, and psychoanalysis. Saussure felt that 19th century linguistics avoided hard questions about what language is and how it works. By 1911, he had taught a general linguistics course only three times. Upon his death, however, his students were so inspired by his teachings that they published them as the "Course in General Linguistics."
Saussure For Beginners takes you through this course, points out the unifying principles, and shows how these ideas migrated from linguistics to other subjects.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781939994417 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | For Beginners |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2015 |
| Series: | For Beginners |
| Pages: | 128 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Abbe Lubell was born in Queens, NY in 1962. She graduated from Oberlin College and then received an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in NY. She has worked as a designer for Tiffany & Co. for many years and has exhibited her paintings sporadically. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband Paul Gordon and two daughters, Sophia and Halle.
Read an Excerpt
Saussure
By W. TERRENCE GORDON, Abbe Lubell
For Beginners LLC
Copyright © 1996 W. Terrence GordonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-939994-41-7
CHAPTER 1
Was there linguistics before Saussure?
Linguistics is analysis of language, and the linguists who do it show up everywhere to get their data. They may want to study any part of language, from sounds to sentence patterns. Or they may want to analyze any use of language, from the pronunciation exercises that babies invent for themselves to those baffling streams of speech in the religious experience known as "speaking in tongues." Some linguists study one language and how its sounds vary in different places in a sound-group ("P" for example, is not pronounced in exactly the same way at the beginning of a word -- "pot," and at the end -- "top"). Some may examine the street slang of their own neighborhoods), but their colleagues may race to a far corner of the world to record conversations among the last few speakers of a dying language.
Modern linguists show up in all sorts of different places.
This is all modern linguistics, twentieth century linguistics, as it has been practiced since Saussure's time -and in many respects because of his influence. So far-reaching has this influence been that Saussure is often called the father of modern linguistics. But what about earlier? Is it not possible that people have been thinking about language for almost as long as they have been using it? Could it not be that as soon as arboreal man interpreted the grunt of his neighbor as meaning "move further down the branch so that I can sit down too," he began to reflect on that act of interpretation? While lessons from the father of modern linguistics will show us why he had no forebearers this far back in time, we do find linguistic terminology and linguistic investigation thriving in the generation preceding Saussure's -- and we find the first flowering of linguistic thought twenty-two centuries before that!
The French word "linguistique," as a noun, had already been in use for at least 24 years when Saussure was born; its English cousin "linguistic" appeared first in 1837 in the writings of the British scholar William Whewell, who defined it as the science of language. Under the influence of American scholars such as Noah Webster Dwight Whitney, 'linguistic' was transformed "linguistics."
By comparison with "linguistic," "linguist" has a practically hoary history: It was first used by Shakespeare in 1591 in Two Gentlemen of Verona to mean "one who is skilled in the use of language." Fifty years later, John Wilkins gave the term the meaning "student of language." Language scholars were known as 'philologists' before 'linguist' became the term of choice, and the two terms continued in use alongside each other through the years of Saussure's lifetime.
It didn't take the invention of the terms "linguist" and "linguistics" for the analytic study of language to begin. The link between logic and language in Aristotle's work and the categories he established mark the beginning of what would eventually be called linguistics. The debate over whether language is natural (do we call a table a table because that's the way it is?) or conventional (do we call it a table because that's what we decided to call it?) in Plato's Cratylus is the very question that opens Saussure's teachings and ties them together.
Before we start looking at the principles Saussure taught, we need to get clear about what he meant by the term "sign."
Definition of the linguistic sign
"No Smoking" doesn't cover it. A red slash through a cigarette in a circle doesn't cover it. Pictures, diagrams, graphs, maps, gestures, traffic lights, license plates -- all of these are SIGNS.
Anything that tells us about something other than itself is a SIGN.
Why "other than itself?" Because the jagged line on a graph isn't there to make you think about jagged lines; it's there to show sales going up and down, or the stock market fluctuating, etc. The red light at an intersection isn't there to make you think about redness; it's there to make you stop. When we speak or write, the sounds we make or the words on the page aren't there just as sounds or ink marks; they bring ideas to our minds.
Words are SIGNS too. When we discuss words, and take them as examples of SIGNS, we should call them "LINGUISTIC SIGNS," but usually it just gets shortened to "SIGNS."
How did Saussure break with earlier ways of analyzing language and why?
When Saussure sat down to prepare his lecture notes for the course in general linguistics he had been asked to teach, he did not undertake a high and wide survey of linguistic thinking from ancient times. He makes no mention of Plato's Cratylus. But one excessively imaginative historian of linguistics does speculate that Saussure was influenced by Buddhist philosophy!
Saussure was too dissatisfied with the results produced by earlier linguists to base his teaching on their work. They had failed to ask the question Saussure puts at the beginning and at the end of all his teaching:
How could such a basic and important question have been overlooked?
Mainly because linguists had confined their interest to the historical study of language -- its origins, its growth, the changes it underwent -- and especially because linguistic analysis had always been based on written texts. Saussure asked his students to examine instead the spoken word as a starting point for understanding the unique and absolute individuality of every expressive act. This led to the first of the pairs of terms that Saussure used to develop a framework for linguistics -- the difference between LANGUE (what we can do with language) and PAROLE (what we do with language when we speak).
This distinction can be made in English through the terms LANGUAGE and SPEECH. Many languages distinguish between these and did so before Saussure came on the scene, but linguists had never grounded their analyses here.
This was the great flaw that Saussure saw in even the best of earlier approaches to linguistics, the flaw that he set out to correct. Once LANGUAGE versus SPEECH was taken as a starting point, it opened the way for Saussure to make further distinctions within language. This set a direction for linguistics that was completely different from the one taken by nineteenth century historical linguists. Saussure did not abandon historical linguistics in his teaching, but he did not limit himself to it.
In what other ways did Saussure innovate?
Answer:
By linking linguistics to the more general study of signs (Reminder: a SIGN is anything that stands for something other than itself), by identifying features of language as mental entities, by stressing the creativity of language, by establishing a terminology for linguistics that favored carefully defined general terms over technical ones, by a teaching technique that made free use of analogies for features of language drawn from fields as varied as music, chess, mountaineering, and the solar system. In this way, he added imagination to critical scrutiny of his nineteenth century predecessors and brought linguistics into the twentieth century.
What are the most important lessons in the course in general linguistics (CGL)?
Why did Saussure decide that the nomenclature view of language was inadequate?
First of all because it is an over-simplification of the processes of interaction between mind, world, and words at the time that language came into being. It assumes that humans already had ideas and that they simply put words to these ideas. This is the linguistic equivalent of imposing the final word on whether the chicken or the egg came first.
Saussure's intuition told him that just as the chicken might have been the egg's idea for getting more eggs, the emergence of ideas and words must have occurred under a process of mutual influence.
So, on the one hand, the nomenclature view takes too little into account. But it is also vague, giving no indication if the name linked to a thing is basically a psychic entity (Saussure's term for a mental entity shared by the community of speakers who use it to communicate with each other) or a vocal entity (a sound or sequence of sounds). For Saussure, working his way toward the distinction between LANGUAGE and SPEECH, the vagueness of the nomenclature view would not do.
In fact, he admits that he found the two-part sign of the nomenclature view appealing. It was only the oversimplification of the processes involved in the birth of language that needed to be avoided.
Saussure side-steps this problem in his definition of the SIGN, replacing the fuzzy term NAME from the nomenclature view by ACOUSTIC IMAGE (the mental image of a name that allows a language-user to say the name) and banishing THING in favor of CONCEPT, so that the definition will pair two entities that belong to LANGUAGE. It's a definition that solves the problems Saussure saw with the nomenclature view, but at the expense of eliminating THINGS -- the world that language is used to refer to. It would not be long after the CGL was published that Saussure came in for criticism over his definition.
Once Saussure got the sign defined to his satisfaction as an entity with two parts, he decided to change their names from CONCEPT and ACOUSTIC IMAGE, to SIGNIFIED and SIGNIFIER, respectively. In the original French the terms are signifié and signifiant, which translate literally as "signified" and "signifying."
Why choose terms that are so similar and run the risk of confusion? Saussure believed that the minimal difference in form between the names of the two parts of the sign would serve to emphasize the contrast between them, as well as the contrast between each of them and the sign as a whole.
Conversation between Saussure, C. K. Ogden, and I. A. Richards:
Ogden: You say the linguistic sign has two parts?
Saussure: Correct.
Richards: A "concept" linked to an "acoustic image?"
Saussure: Also correct.
Ogden: A "signified" linked to a "signifier?"
Saussure: Correct again!
Richards: And both are "mental entities?"
Saussure: Yes! Yes!
The definition of theSIGNand the question of what its parts are called are just preliminaries to what Saussure called his first principle:
The linguistic sign is arbitrary
The LINGUISTIC SIGN is Arbitrary. Rivers of ink have flowed in the discussion of this notion. To keep clear about what Saussure meant by it, we have to remember that his SIGN has two parts, and that what is arbitrary (determined by choice; randomly chosen) is making the connection between them. Language can make any connection it chooses.
When the first language came into existence, when the first word (SIGN) came into existence, any sound or sequence of sounds (SIGNIFIER) could have been chosen to express any concept (SIGNIFIED). The proof of arbitrariness is that when different languages came into existence they developed different SIGNS, different links between SIGNIFIERS and SIGNIFIEDS. If the LINGUISTIC SIGN were not arbitrary, there would be only one language in the world.
But even though the SIGN is arbitrary as far as the connection between its SIGNIFIER and SIGNIFIED goes, it is not arbitrary for language users. If it were, everybody could come up with whatever SIGNS they wanted, and communication would break down.
The principle of the arbitrariness of the linguistic SIGN operates in connection with Saussure's second principle:
(The Signifier is Linear)
"Linear" makes us think of space, and a printed SIGNIFIER (such as any of the words you are reading here) is linear. But Saussure is thinking primarily of time when he says 'linear.' A spoken SIGNIFIER is just as linear as a written one, because whenever it is more complex than a single sound (which is almost always the case), it occurs in a sequence over time. That makes it linear. Compare the following examples:
The second example is more complex, but both are linear.
Saussure does not give many details in discussing the principle of linearity, but he tells us that the operation of language depends on it. He goes so far as to say that its consequences are profound, and in fact they are. Why? Because linearity keeps us from seeing or hearing a SIGNIFIER or SIGNIFIERS all at once. The big difference between the linearity of the SIGNIFIER and the arbitrariness of the SIGN is that the first is like a chain, but the second is just one link.
How and why the linguistic sign is unchangeable
Saussure moves on from his concept of the two-part SIGN to the relationship between the SIGN and its users. Here he detects a paradox (a statement that seems contrary to common sense but is nonetheless probably true): language is free to set up a link between any sound (or sequence of sounds) and any idea, but once the link is made, neither an individual speaker nor the whole community of speakers is free to undo it. They are not free to replace that link by another one either.
For example: the English language could have chosen some other sequence of sounds than the three in "top" to express the idea of the highest part of an object (and other languages did), but now it is here to stay. Governments cannot legislate a word out of existence. Why? Because it was never legislated into existence.
There are other ways to explain why LINGUISTIC SIGNS cannot be modified at will, but Saussure prefers the one linked to a principle he has already set out -- the arbitrariness of the SIGN. Since the SIGN is arbitrary, there is no reason to prefer one particular SIGNIFIER-SIGNIFIED combination over any other. Arbitrariness makes it impossible to argue the relative merits of SIGNS in any rational way.
How could all the speakers of English be convinced to start using some other way of expressing the idea of "top"?
How and why the linguistic sign is changeable
Over time, language and its SIGNS change. New SIGNIFIER-SIGNIFIED links may replace old ones or add to their number. "Tide" used to mean "period" or "season," now it means "periodic rise and fall of water level"; "mouse" used to mean only a type of small rodent, till personal computers were invented and brought with them a new meaning of "mouse" that coexists comfortably with the old one.
Saussure has just finished teaching us that the SIGNIFIER-SIGNIFIED link is arbitrary and that this arbitrariness prevents linguistic change by design; now it appears that the same arbitrariness permits language to change. If the SIGN were not arbitrary, the new meanings of "tide" and "mouse" could never have developed.
The arbitrariness of the SIGN is a tough concept. Saussure had to start with it because other principles turn out to be a necessary consequence of it.
Linguistics can study language AT ONE POINT IN TIME or ITS DEVELOPMENT OVER TIME.
Saussure talks about two ways of analyzing language -- SYNCHRONIC and DIACHRONIC. Why did he choose these terms? If you know the Latin words they come from, you can answer this question, but nowadays most people don't know Latin. (Latin: Synchronous = same time; Diachronous = through time.)
Over time, language evolves and signs do change.
So let's clarify by asking the same question about names for dogs. Why Spot? Obviously, because the dog has spots on his body? Why Rover? Because he likes to rove. Here is a pair of names you can do something with. Since SYNCHRONIC means at one spot in time, and DIACHRONIC means at different points in time, you can turn SYNCHRONIC and DIACHRONIC into SPOT and ROVER to remind you which is which.
Language cannot be fully described apart from an account of the community that uses it and the effects of time. But the description cannot be accurate unless language as a SYSTEM is viewed separately from the effects of time on that system. So, Saussure divides linguistics into SYNCHRONIC and DIACHRONIC. A SYNCHRONIC STUDY examines the relations among co-existing elements of a language and is therefore independent of any time factor by definition. It gives an account of a state of the language SYSTEM. The notion of a system implies that, if the account is valid, it will present that state as a whole of interacting elements. By contrast, a DIACHRONIC STUDY describes an evolution in which only fragments of states of a language at different times are relevant to the account.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Saussure by W. TERRENCE GORDON, Abbe Lubell. Copyright © 1996 W. Terrence Gordon. Excerpted by permission of For Beginners LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,Was there linguistics before Saussure?,
Definition of the linguistic sign,
How did Saussure break with earlier ways of analyzing language and why?,
The most important lessons in the Course in General Linguistics,
The linguistic sign,
Synchronic and diachronic analysis,
The elements of language,
Context and contrast create synchronic identity,
Synchronic identity is separable from synchronic value,
Language is a system of values,
The link between sound and thought in the lingistic sign,
Meaning is distinct from linguistic value,
Linguistic forms,
Differences in the language system,
Oppostions among signs,
Linear and nonlinear relations,
Diachronic linguistics,
Phonetic changes,
Analogy,
Agglutination,
European structuralism,
Gustave Guillaume (1883-1960),
Pierre Guiraud (1912-1982),
Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949),
Noam Chomsky (1928- ),
Claude Lévi Strauss (1906- ),
Roland Barthes (1915-1980),
Jacques Lacan (1901-1981),
Jacques Derrida (1930- ),
Anagrams,
Saussure at a glance,
Appendix,
Index,