Customer Reviews

Course in General Linguistics (Open Court Classics)

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Saussure is important as a linguist (although many of his theories have since been put out to pasture) ... but he is most important for his contributions to the theory of Structuralism (and, later, Poststructuralism). His idea that you could not study language as individual units, but rather had to examine it as a structure and study how the units interacted within the structure, was enormously influential in modern and postmodern philosophy.

This book is not particularly difficult; it's a bit dry, but what can you expect from a linguistics class? If you read it carefully, you'll have no problem grasping what he is saying... and, when you are done, you will be well on your way to understanding what people like Lacan, Derrida and Foucault are trying to say. (You'll also be well along your way to understanding Claude Levi-Strauss, who attempted to do for anthropology what Saussure did for linguistics). If you want to understand modern philosophy, Saussure is as indispensible as Marx or Freud. Combine this with *Saussure for Beginners* and you'll pick up Saussure's train of thought in no time.

This book comprised from lecture notes of Saussure to his students in Geneva (compiled posthumously by his students) is a work which changed the course of lingustics since its publication. In this book he makes distinctions which have later become central to discussions of linguistics like:

1. Sign as the unity of signifier (letters, sounds, image) and signified (meaning implied by the signifier)
2. Language (langage) as the unity of langue (code - language as a system) and parole (usage)
3. Syncrhonic (language as static system) and diachronic lingustics (langauge as an ever changing, evolving system)
4. Retrospective (language evolution so far) and prospective linguistics (future evolution of a language).

Many linguists have added a cloud of debate over these concepts, but non explains as lucidly as the master who propounded these. For those confused bout semiotics, semiology etc., this work is a reference point for the original meaning of the term 'semiology' as intended by Saussure. Many of Saussure's binary distinctions became the central to an approach to social sciences called structuralism which still holds sway in social sciences.

If you need to know the foundation of structuralism then you need to read this book. This is where it all begins and the translation of this edition flows well and is perfect for the beginner and novice alike.

One problem with this translation that potential readers should be aware of: If you are reading this to get a better understanding of the terms used by structuralists (signifier and signified) then you need to get the other version. This edition uses the words signification and signal.

Although the rest of text is fine, the exclusion of signifier and signified is, I believe, the only major drawback to the book since these were the terms adopted by structuralist and post-structuralist.

What is there to say about Ferdinand de Saussure's most important work that I could possibly say in a short Amazon review? This is a foundational work of incredible importance. If you're looking at this listing, I probably don't need to sell you on the book itself.

My comments strictly pertain to this particular edition (ISBN 978-1443253352 - Philosophical Library publishing) because I found it very disappointing. I assumed that because the publishing date was later, there had been some improvement to the translation, a new critical introduction, or some other such feature. There are no such features to be found. You get Saussure's text and that's it.

The real outrage is in the incredibly poor printing. Much of the book looks like it's actually a photo-copy. In fact, a number of pages have blemishes on the text, as if there was a hair between the page and Xerox machine. It literally looks like this edition was photo-copied from a previous edition. I've never seen anything like it.

My advice is to avoid this edition and buy one of the earlier, more inexpensive ones. You're certainly not getting any additional quality for the increased price. This will be the last title I purchase from Philosophical Library Publishers.

Fredinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics - FIVE Stars
This edition - ZERO Stars

The thirties of the last century cradled the birth and growth of structuralist Linguistcs in many horizons like phonology ,grammar , etc ... and if we were about to ask who embraced that stream , we would - undebatably - find the name of Ferdinand De Saussure.

This fine book of his explained his structural approach to language and established a series of theoretical distinctions that have become basic to the study of linguistics.

Saussure made a differentiation between the (actual speech) or what we call a spoken language ,and the knowledge underlying speech that speakers share about (what is) grammatical.
For Saussure speech represents instances of grammar and the mission of the linguist is to find the underlying rules of a particular language from examples found in speech.
this is different than the descriptivist's p.o.v ,since the structuralist sees grammar as a set of relationships that account for speech ,rather than a set of instances of speech.

Once you grasp the main concepts of this oeuvre you can go further by reading Bloomfield's works on Structuralism.

Ferdinand de Saussure's work in linguistics was a conceptual breakthrough in that he broke with the comparative approach of traditional philology. Saussure argues against the study of mere semantics and phonology and locates the object of linguistic study as the structure of sign and signification. Although there is a failure to truly resolve the problem of the linguistic unit, Saussure still makes brilliant conceptual breakthroughs regarding the synchronic-diachronic distinction. Although much of the content of this course is no longer accepted my contemporary linguists, this text is still a landmark in that it would later prove to be crucially important to the achievements of structural anthropology, philosophy, and literary theory.

For anyone wanting to understand structuralism or post-structuralism, this is the beginning and the end. This work is profoundly important and provides a new window through which to view the world. It is a treat to read and discover!

This book arguably represents one of the most influential and original linguistic/philosophical achievements of the XXth century. It is remarkable for its simplicity, breadth, clarity, depth and what to me looks like a certain uncontrivedness that undoubtedly reflects a mind that is rooted into something fundamental. De Saussure, a Swiss linguist, provides a system which articulates the boundaries delimiting 'language', 'speech' & 'writing'. Language is essentially a social phenomenon construed of signs that derive their meaning/form from human interaction. Saussure first looks at language in an evolutionary context as a living organism situated in an ecological niche. Next, language is defined as an emergent system composed of interlocked signs. A sign is any device through which beings communicate with each other; a red dot in the mid-brow signifies a Hindu devotee, for example. The original insight here is that words which in themselves are arbitrary embody meaning through an inherent relationship between the 'signifier' and the 'signified'. By deconstructing the sign into its components (form and meaning) Saussure provided a new tool - "semiology", a study of signs - a toolbox which was used to categorize and classify not only languages but any cultural constructs.

de Saussure provides several examples of how meaning is generated and retained in a language despite enormous changes in how words are written and pronounced. Structure of a language is defined by the identity of individual sounds (phonemes) that constitute it, by the way they distinguish themselves negatively from other sounds and by the rules which combine letters into meaningful words. This is explained physiologically by discussing the generation of sound by the glottis, mouth, lips, nasal cavity, oral cavity etc (P. 42) - thus, the Chinese/Japanese neither hear nor can vocalize with control the sounds beginning with "l" or "r" just as we have trouble with the click languages of Africa or guttural/palatal sounds of the Native Americans.

I wonder how Saussure's ideas apply to more primitive alphabets such as Hebrew where each letter corresponds to an object/animal or Egyptian/Chinese pictographs where a written word represents a visual image that is decoupled from sound.

Saussure's classification of sounds has paved the way for structural linguistics of Jakobson and influenced Chomsky & provided a foundation for structural anthropology (Levi-Strauss and his classifications of tribal relationships), even defined postmodernism as we know it. Baudrillard's System of Objects is based on de Saussure. When Derrida rails against the primacy of speech he is battling (ineffectually), Saussure.

This work is easy to read and provides a foundation to much of modern linguistics, social psychology, anthropology, philosophy and, one might argue, computer science. The book is basically a meditation on the way we structure reality - language shapes thought that separates between constituents of reality and in turn, the mental entities composing thought shape language. For me, reading it, many things fell into place.

When Ferdinand De Saussure died in 1913, he had spent a lifetime investigating the complex role that language played in the way that human beings learned. His interest, therefore, was limited to explicating the issues faced by his fellow theorists. He had no abiding interest in literature, sociology, psychology, or any other discipline than linguistics. Fortunately, after his death, several students combined their lecture notes to publish posthumously the COURSE IN GENERAL LINGUISTICS in 1916. One cannot overstate the colossal ramifications of this book. Despite the fact that it was written with a French speaking scholar in mind who had more than a passing familiarity with Proto-Indo European languages, serious students in various disciplines were quick to note its potential to advance their respective causes. Within a few decades, his theories became bedrock assumptions for those who sought to uncover an overarching set of rules that would account for the behavior of discrete units within that system.

De Saussure begins by distinguishing between the entire spectrum of language discourse (langue) and the individual spoken utterances of single words (parole). He was not concerned with parole. His focus was on langue. He had the controversial idea that langue did not exist as an actual entity in the physical universe. Langue had to be constructed from parole. The inference was that all languages, however unrelated semantically, yet shared a common structure. It is his relentless urging that all languages had this shared root that allows moderns to call him the Father of Structuralism. Further, he devised a conceptual tool to describe how langue and parole interact to produce meaning. Any word could be reduced to a simple structure--the sign. By "sign" he did not imply a symbolic equivalent of one thing for another. Rather, he defined a sign as having two interconnected parts: the "signifier" (the spoken word that has meaning only for one who understands that language) and the "signified" (the unverbalized concept within the mind). This relation is arbitrary and totally a function of only that one culture and one language. The inference here was as unsettling as the ramification between langue and parole. If all cultures invested their respective languages with arbitrarily assigned equivalences between a signifier and its signified, then it followed that buried somewhere deep within the human brain were underlying pseudo-codes that could form the basis of future and predictable patterns. As these signs interact on a discrete level, De Saussure threw yet another linguistic bomb by suggesting that his contemporaries were dead wrong in their insistence that the evolution of language must be viewed only through a prism of long periods of time, decades and centuries. Such an open-ended time frame he called diachronic. De Saussure countered that it was meaningless to ascribe texture and significance to speakers who did not and could not interact over such vast time frames. For meaning to have meaning, a speaker must focus only on the here and now of a word. Such a closed-ended time frame he called synchronic. This difference was hardly picayune since a variety of competing ideologists, including Marxists, for example, insisted that for historical determinism to be valid only the long run could count.

The ideas in his COURSE IN GENERAL LINGUISTICS ran supreme until the mid 1960s. The post-structuralists, deconstructionists, and the post-modernists increasingly came to view De Saussure and his structuralist theories as misleading at best and cosmically wrong at worst. These critics saw him as one who tried to place a suffocating one size fits all blanket on the infinitely complex nature of human beings. Regardless of the legitimacy of this charge, Ferdinand De Saussure still stands as one of the giants of critical theory--even if we are not quite sure about the complexity of human nature.

Fundamental text in Linguistics and semiotic theory. Good edition - cheap and easy to read.