Saussure and the Course in General Linguistics

Saussure was born in Geneva in 1857, and entered the University of Geneva in 1875 as a student of physics and chemistry, before switching his attention to Classical languages and later moving to study Indo-European at Leipzig where, aged just 21, he published his dissertation ‘Memoir on the Primitive System of Vowels in Indo-European Languages’, to considerable acclaim. Thereafter he enjoyed further success in Paris, where he stayed until 1891, when he returned to Geneva to take up a Chair.

The work for which Saussure is best known, however, was not published in his lifetime, nor indeed written by Saussure himself. The Course in General Linguistics (henceforth Course), which has been likened to a Copernican revolution in the discipline, opens with a brief summary of the history of linguistics, in which Saussure identifies three stages:

The first, beginning with the Greeks, he defines as the ‘grammar’ stage, which he sees as essentially prescriptive and unscientific.

The second, ‘philological’ stage he dates from the work of Friedrich Wolf in 1777, and again sees as not purely linguistic in intention, focused as it was on elucidating texts written in different periods.

The third, and for Saussure the most interesting stage (the first two are dismissed in little more than a page), is that of comparative philology, which he dates from the work of Franz Bopp in 1816. Saussure’s critique of the comparative school, as he calls it, echoes the concerns raised in his letter to Meillet: it had failed to define the nature of its study, and in its endeavour to establish relations between languages had paid scant attention to the nature of words as representative signs.

Genesis of the Course

In spite of his success as a philologist, Saussure shows signs of dissatisfaction with the contemporary methods and even the terminology of linguistics from an early stage. In the frustration he expresses in a letter to the eminent French linguist Antoine Meillet in 1894, we see the germ of the work that would make him famous.

‘but I am fed up with all that, and with the general difficulty of writing even ten lines of good sense on linguistic matters. For a long time I have been above all preoccupied with the logical classification of linguistic facts and with the classification of the points of view from which we treat them; and I am more and more aware of the immense amount of work that would be required to show the linguist what he is doing…

‘The utter inadequacy of current terminology, the need to reform it and, in order to do that, to demonstrate what sort of object language is, continually spoils my pleasure in philology, though I have no dearer wish than not to be made to think about the nature of language in general. This will lead, against my will, to a book in which I shall explain, without enthusiasm or passion, why there is not a single term used in linguistics which has any meaning for me. Only after this, I confess, will I be able to take up my work at the point I left off.’

The book to which Saussure refers was eventually published, but only after his death. Compiled posthumously by Saussure’s students from his Geneva lecture notes from three courses taught between 1906 and 1911, and edited by two of Saussure’s colleagues, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger, the Course in General Linguistics (Cours de Linguistique Générale) was published in 1916, three years after his death, and has had far-reaching repercussions for linguistic study ever since.