Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was a Swiss linguist whose account of language as a structured system of signs helped establish modern linguistics and structuralism.

Linguistic sign: A unit that joins a form, such as a sound or written mark, with a concept. Saussure analyzed signs as unions of signifier and signified.
Structural linguistics: An approach that studies language as a system of interdependent elements and relations. Saussure’s model made relational structure the basis for analyzing language.
Course in General Linguistics: A foundational book on language, assembled from Saussure’s lecture notes by his students and published in 1916. This posthumous work became the main source through which Saussure’s theory circulated.
Structuralism: An intellectual approach that explains cultural phenomena through underlying systems of relations. Saussure’s relational account of signs became a model for structuralist analysis beyond linguistics.
Signifier and signified: The signifier is a sign’s perceptible form; the signified is the concept it evokes. These are the two inseparable sides of Saussure’s linguistic sign.
Arbitrariness of the linguistic sign: The principle that no natural bond requires a particular signifier to be joined to a particular signified. Saussure used this principle to explain why languages assign different forms to similar concepts.
Indo-European linguistics: The comparative study of languages belonging to the Indo-European language family. Saussure began as a historical linguist working on Indo-European language structure and change.
Roman Jakobson: A Russian-American linguist who helped develop structural linguistics and modern phonology. Jakobson extended structural analysis to sound systems, language functions, and poetics.
Langue and parole: Langue is a shared social language system; parole is its particular use in speech or writing. This distinction separates the system Saussure studied from individual acts of speaking.
Linguistic value: The identity and function a linguistic unit acquires through its differences from other units in the same system. For Saussure, a sign’s value comes from its contrasts with neighboring signs.

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