Ferdinand De Saussure Language Summary
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist who laid the foundation on the ideas of structure in the study and interpretation of meaning in semantics.
Saussure’s work examines the relationship between speech and the evolution of language, and investigates language as a structured system of signs.
Saussure defines linguistics as the study of language, and as the study of the manifestations of human speech. To Saussure, linguistics is also concerned with the history of languages, and with the social or cultural influences that shape the development of language. He further compares a language to the game of chess in which piece is defined by both its situation on the board and its relationship with the other pieces.
In two of his seminar works; Course in General Linguistics and Object of Study, Saussure shows a clear reaction against many of the ideas raised by the historical-philosophical linguists and establishes why it becomes
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He further asserts that “speaking is an activity of the individual; language is the social manifestation of speech”. Therefore, language is a system of signs that evolves from the activity of speech.
The language one speaks serves as a link between his or her thought and sound, as well as the means though which his or her thought is expressed as sound. Thoughts have to become ordered, and sounds have to be articulated, for language to occur. Saussure says that language is really a borderland between thought and sound, where thought and sound combine to provide communication.
To assess Saussure’s place as the founder of modern linguistics is to look at what has become known today as “the triangle of signification”. Signification in its broadest schematic sense is generally described as a triadic relation between A, the sign (e.g., a signifier), B, a concept (or signified), and C the thing referred to (significatum or
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