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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 June 2016
When Ferdinand de Saussure, the eminent linguist, died in 1913, no publications had resulted from his teachings in general linguistics. After his death, however, several of his disciples published his university lectures from notes taken down by students in class and from Saussure’s personal notes. Today, half-acentury later, the full implications of Saussure’s teachings have still to be elaborated. For a long time, American scholars seemed particularly reluctant to turn to the Cours; reviews or critiques were few and far between. In the words of Einar Haugen: “Rarely does one see a reference in American writings on linguistic theory to the works of de Saussure, Trubetzkoy, or other European writers, although they were the thinkers who gave us the instruments with which we work. I yield to no one in my admiration for Bloomfield and Sapir; but I regard it as a kind of provincialism to suppose that all sound linguistics began with them.” This state of affairs changed rather quickly with the 1959 English translation of the Cours after which the work enjoyed rather unprecedented success. To give only one instance, Noam Chomsky, who had made no important references to Saussure before 1959, referred to him frequently after that date.
This work was supported by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies (L-58-1964).
1 Cours de linguistique générale (Geneva, 1916).
2 See especially Wells, R. S., “De Saussure’s System of Linguistics,” Word 3 (1947), pp. 1–31 Google Scholar; Waterman, J. T., “Ferdinand de Saussure: Forerunner of Modern Structuralism,” Modern Language Journal 40 (1956), pp. 307–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Lg. 27 (1951), p. 211.
4 Course in General Linguistics (New York, 1959). Translated by Wade Baskin.
5 Chomsky, N., “The Logical Basis of Linguistic Theory,” Preprints for the Ninth International Congress of Linguists (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 509–74 Google Scholar; see p. 510. Cf. also Handbook of Mathematical Psychology, Vol. 2 (New York, 1963), pp. 327-30.
6 Ibid., p. 510.
7 Ibid., pp. 531, 532, 553 f.
8 Ibid., p. 514.
9 Ibid., p. 512.
10 CLG, p. 30: “Si nous pouvions embrasser la somme des images verbales emmagasinées chez tous les individus, nous toucherions le lien social qui constitue la langue. C’est un trésor déposé par la pratique de la parole dans les sujets appartenant à une même communauté, un système grammatical existant virtuellement dans chaque cerveau, ou plus exactement dans les cerveaux d’un ensemble d’individus; car la langue n’est complete dans aucun, elle n’existe parfaitement que dans la masse.” Note that image verbale, image acoustique, and signifiant are used synonymously throughout the Cours. Also “trésor,” CLG, p. 171/CGL, p. 123.
11 CLG, p. 148/CGL, p. 106; p. 172/p. 124. Note also that the “ideal type” on p. 124 is rather misleading.
12 CLG, p. 34/CGL, p. 16; p. 97/p. 65.
13 Cf. CLG, p. 126/CGL, p. 88; p. 131/p. 92 f.; p. 154/p. 110. Cf. also Saussure’s analogies to chess (p. 43/p. 22 f.) and algebra (p. 168/p. 122).
14 See the indices of both editions.
15 CGL, p. xii.
16 Word 3 (1947), p. 9. More recently, Herdan, G., Linguistics 4 (March 1964), p. 57 Google Scholar. evaluates justly: “Two of his (Saussure’s) ideas were specially fruitful: that of the double aspect of the linguistic sign, as signifiant and signifié, whose relations are purely arbitrary, not produced by a selective affinity between sound and meaning, but merely by social convention; and that of the ensemble of linguistic signs as representing not an amorphous mass but a well-articulated matrix, an abstract system of solidarity (langue) which logically precedes and determines all particular utterances (parole). In other words, Saussure has arrived at describing language as a coding system. Most likely, it would not be far from the truth if the more recent history of linguistics was regarded as a process of progressive exploitation of these ideas….” However, I do not feel that Herdan was particularly successful in bringing Saussure’s teaching into line with Bloomfield’s doctrines or his own “quantitative linguistics.” Moreover, I do not share his many prejudices against generative grammar.
17 Again, Chomsky’s usage of “semantics” does not have in “sémantique” its Saussurian counterpart.
18 Objections against the arbitrariness of the correlation signifiant-signifié were raised by Benveniste, E., Acta Linguistica 1 (1939), pp. 23–9 Google Scholar. He believes the correlation to be necessary; the correlation is said to be a tight symbiosis suggesting an organism. Does he wish to imply that this correlation is an innate one and to refute Saussure’s postulate that the correlation is a learned one? The article does not give the answer. Is there any relation to Chomsky’s own rather vague implication of innateness?
19 CLG, p. 187/CGL, p. 136.
20 I have preferred here André Martinet’s distinction of “syntagmatic contrasts” vs. “paradigmatic oppositions” to Saussure’s own “oppositions (rapports) syntagmatiques” vs. “oppositions (rapports) associatives.”
21 CLG, p. 58/CGL, p. 34; R. Godel, Les sources manuscrites du CLG (Geneva, 1957), p. 166.
22 Cf. Chomsky, Logical Basis, p. 532.
23 CLG, p. 56/CGL, p. 33. Saussure’s distinguishes between a “linguistique de la langue” and a “linguistique de la parole.”
24 CLG, pp. 180 ff./CGL, pp. 131 ff.
25 Onomatopoeic words are not motivated (CLG, p. 101 f./CGL, p. 69). Otherwise, see Ch. Bally, BSL 41, 121 (1940), pp. 75-88.
26 In our examples, the type of motivation to be illustrated will be grammatical motivation; hence conceptual motivation will not be necessarily exemplified in simplexes and no explicit examples will be drawn from the phonological system.
27 Of course, in a Saussurian analysis, one would also have to explain how we get to the signs he, jump, -ed. This would correspond to showing to what extent he, jump, -ed are “bundles” in Trubetzkoy’s terms, or products of amalgamation in Martinet’s terms.
28 The term used in the Cours is “système de valeurs.” I have hesitated to substitute with “semantic” since “sémantique” occurs only once in the Cours in a very much restricted usage compared with that of “semantic” current today. “Semiological” could not be used either; the Saussurian “sémiologie” is what is known today in America as “semiotics”: language is one of the “systèmes sémiologiques” studied by Saussure’s “sémiologie.”
29 An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).
30 Lg. 39 (1963), pp. 170-210.
31 Transformational grammar is not in fact a linguistic theory in itself; it is rather a metalanguage in which we may make structural statements about motivation in a less ambiguous manner.
32 Chomsky, N., “Explanatory Models in Linguistics,” Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science: Proceedings of the 1960 International Congress (Stanford University Press, 1962), pp. 528–50 Google Scholar. Cf. also Lg. 35 (1959), pp. 26-58. Chomsky postulates that human beings are equipped with an innate mental ability of unknown character and complexity which is specially designed for the acquisition of langue and parole; Saussure’s postulates imply that, whatever the mental equipment of the child, they could have been used, wholly or partially, for the acquisition of mechanisms other than a linguistic one. Saussure finds that the innate mental equipment of the child appears to be a general-purpose faculté d’association et de coordination (faculté réceptive et coordinative) which functions (when adapted) as the faculté linguistique proper. Elsewhere, this general-purpose faculty has been called “faculty of categorization,” i.e. the faculty of arbitrary segmentation of the extra-semiological continuum. When adapted to the purpose of linguistic communication, this segmentation is into signifiants and signifiés. Cf. B. Malmberg, Structural Linguistics and Human Communication (Berlin, 1963), particularly pp. 25 f., 175. Since the totality of signifiés constitutes, in Saussure’s words, our système de valeurs (semantic component), the question arises to what extent the systèmes de valeurs for the various semiological systems of a human being coincide with or differ from each other.
33 CLG, p. 140/CGL p. 99 f.