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Ferdinand de Saussure

1857-1913. 

Ferdinand de Saussure was born in Geneva into a family of well-known scientists. He studied Sanskrit and comparative linguistics in Geneva, Paris, and Leipzig, where he fell in with the circle of young scholars known as the Neogrammarians. Brugmann, in particular, was his mentor, but he was also close to Karl Verner and others of the circle.

In 1878, at the age of 21, Saussure published a long and precocious paper called "Note on the Primitive System of the Indo-European Vowels". He explained in greater and clearer detail than others who were coming to similar conclusions how the PIE ablaut system worked. (Ablaut is the ancient system of vowel alternations in the parent language, visible in surviving irregular alternations among cognates like Latin ped vs. Greek pod, 'foot'; and also in the Germanic strong verb system in exemplified by vowel alternates like sing, sang, sung).

One of the most inspired parts of his analysis is the positing of 'sonorant co-efficients', consonantal elements that do not appear in any daughter language but can be hypothesized due to the systematic way the vowels are affected in the descendent languages, and due to position and distribution of such elements in the rest of the PIE system. The great 20th century Indo-Europeanist Jerzy Kurylowicz later pointed out that Hittite, the last-discovered ancient Indo-European language, had consonants in just the positions predicted by Saussure's analysis. These consonants are now called laryngeals, and the study of laryngeals, bringing to bear more recent evidence than Saussure had access to, is still an important area of Indo-European studies.

This brilliant start was not followed by any tremendous output of published work, but it contained the seeds of his essential insight into the importance of the linguistic system and how central it is for understanding human knowledge and behavior. De Saussure was only eight years younger than Karl Brugmann, and he died some years earlier than Brugmann; yet because of his re-focussing of attention onto aspects of language that had not been part of the older field, he seems to belong to a later generation. His ideas fit into a recognizably modern era in which human phenomena are no longer viewed primarily from the point of view of their construed trajectory through time, but as structural wholes that are self-contained and whose parts fill interrelated functions.

Saussure's influence on linguists was far-reaching, first through his direct influence on his students at the University of Geneva, who practically worshipped him, and then through his ideas as collected and disseminated after his death by two of his students, Charles Bally and Albert Sechaye These students, who became well-known linguistic researchers in their own right, put together course notes from their and another student's notebooks to produce the Cours de Linguistique Generale, based on several of Saussure's courses of lectures at Geneva, using the notebooks of various students attending. This composite work, shaped and interpreted by Bally and Sechaye, was prepared in the years immediately following Saussure's death as a tribute and as a way making his brilliant ideas accessible beyond Geneva and for posterity. It worked: the Cours was widely read in French by scholars all over Europe, and in 1959 was translated into English by Wade Baskin mainly for American students, who were less likely to have learned to read French than their European counterparts. A new translation of the Cours by Roy Harris appeared in 1986.

Saussure's fresh ideas were consonant with those of his influental compatriot Claude Levi-Strauss, and also those of Emile Durkheim, pioneer of the new field of sociology. Saussure's influence spread all through the new social sciences in the early and mid-twentieth century, and ultimately, for better or worse, to literary theory and modern cultural studies. They still exert a very strong intellectual force in all these disciplines (probably most in Linguistics and the disciplines most influenced by literary theory; less so now in traditional Anthropology, Sociology, and Psychology).

In Linguistics, Saussure's focus on the synchronic dimension and on language as an interrelated system of elements was maintained through the American Structuralist period (Bloomfield, Hockett), and also in the Generative period (Chomsky, Bresnan). His view of the essential nature of the form-meaning pairing, without the intermediate and essentiallly meaningless syntactic layer posited by Chomsky, Perlmutter, and other generative theory-builders, has re-emerged in theories like Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Sag and Pollard) and Construction Grammar.

Modern Functionalist theories have integrated diachrony much more than generative theories (cf. the Functional Typology of Greenberg, Givón, Comrie, Heine, and Bybee), but the focus on the synchronic has nevertheless been essentially maintained in modern Cognitive theories of language, in keeping with the synchronic view of the human mind in the Cognitive Sciences, notably Psychology and Neuroscience.

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THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE 

The discipline of linguistics can be likened to a pathway which is being cut through the dark and mysterious forest of language. Different parts of the forest have been explored at different times.

Nineteenth century: historical linguistics

Before the 19^th century, language in the western world was of interest mainly philosophers. It is significant that the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle made major contributions to the study of language. Plato, is said to have been the first person to distinguish between noun and verbs. 1786 is the year which many people regard as the birthdate of linguistics. This emphasis on language change eventually led to a major theoretical advance.

The influence of the 19^th- century scholars was strong. Even today, one still meets members of the general public who expect the cataloguing of linguistic changes and the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European to be the central concern of modern  linguistics.

Early-to-mid-20^th century: descriptive linguistics

In the 20^th century, the emphasis shifted from language change to language description.

The term structural linguistics is sometimes misunderstood. It does not necessarily refer to a separate branch or school linguistics. All linguistics since de Saussure is structural, as structural in this broad sense merely means the recognition that language is a patterned system composed of interdependent elements, rather than a collection of unconnected individual teams.

In America, linguistics began as an offshoot of anthropology. Around the beginning of the 20^th century, anthropologists were eager to record the culture of the fast-dying American-Indies tribes, and the American-Indian languages were one aspect of this. In 1933 with a publication of Leonard Bloomfield´s comprehensive work entitied simply Language, which attempted to lay down rigorous procedures for the description of any language. Bloomfield considered that linguistics should deal objectively ad systematically with observable data. So he was more interested in the way items were arranged than in meaning.

Mid- to late. 20^th century: generative linguistics and the search for universals

In 1957, linguistics took a new turning. Noam Chomsky, a teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of –technology, published a book called Syntactic Structures; this book started a revolution in linguistics. Chomsky, he is the linguistic whose reputation has spread furthers outside linguistics.

Applied Linguistics and Linguistics

Modern linguistics necessarily begins with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and his General course of Linguistics. His systematic structural approach to language has been a foundation for virtually all of linguistics since that time. The central continuing notion is that language is a closed system of structural relations, meanings and grammatical uses of linguistic elements depend on the sets of oppositions created among all the elements within the system.

Current Generative Theory

Chomsky quickly recognized the limitations of early semantic- based approaches, and from the late 1960s to the late 1970s he argued for atheory of grammar that was first known as the “extended standard theory”.

Descriptive Syntax

The descriptivist approach initiated by de Saussure and developed in the United States under Boas did not disappear with the rise of the behavioristically oriented American structural linguistics.

Phonetics and Phonology

Phonetics and phonology have undergone a number of changes over the last 25 years and phonology in particular has been subject to major theoretical revisions. 

Morphology

Linguistic research on morphology and on the organization of the lexicon has not initiated any great changes in practical research over the last twenty years. Applied linguistic research on lexicography, terminology development, second- language acquisition and language teaching is still employing descriptive approaches that have been in use for some time.

Semantics and Pragmatics

Semantics particularly the area of lexical semantics has been important to applied linguistics. Research in second- language acquisition and lexicography have both used lexical semantics as a resource for research on how words may be related and on how they differ in various ways.

Pragmatics, a historical development out of semantics, has had a much greater impact on applied linguistics, primarily because issues raised and the theories developed directly inform discourse analysis.

Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis

The most important area of research for applied linguistics is the field of discourse analysis, and the contributions of discourse analysis made by sociolinguists are central. The most powerful foundation for applied research has been the development of the notion of communicative competence. 

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