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Sign and Value in Saussure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Hugh Bredin
Hugh Bredin
Affiliation:
The Queen's University Of Belfast
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Extract

The most important, or at least the most central, part of Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics is found in the first six chaptersof Part Two. Here, Saussure formulates one of the basic principles of Structuralism. Yet the text is in some ways oddly impenetrable. It is dear enough on a quick reading, but closer attention discovers doubtful meanings, ambiguity, the beginnings even of contradictions. These defects may, of course, be inevitable in a reconstructed text. Or they may testify to some profound erroneousness in the thought, to a theory whose natal difficulties are symptoms, not of the elusiveness of truth, but of a miscarriage. It is mypurpose here to argue the latter.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 59 , Issue 227 , January 1984 , pp. 67 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1984

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References

1 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (London: Fontana, 1974). All page references are to this edition. The translation of one passage cited has been slightly altered, as is indicatedin n. 3.

2 Saussure died in 1913. His Course in General Linguistics, which appeared in 1915, was compiled by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, on the basis mainly of student lecture notes. For a critical edition giving the text and collated notes see Cours de Linguistique Générate, Rudolf Engler (ed.) (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1967).

3 L'ensemble des différences phoniques et conceptuelles qui constitue la langue résulte done de deux sortes de comparaisons: les rapprochements sont tantôt associatifs, tantôt syntagmatiques. (I have altered the translation slightly.)

4 This is not, of course, the only condition operating upon the rules if they are to be the rules of a system.

5 This is strictly true only of first-order rules. Second-order rules, or rules about rules, are a different matter. It is not clear whether there is anything like second-order rules in language.

6 It is generally held that Baudouin de Courtenay was in some respects a precursor of Saussure. But so far as I am aware we find nothing inhis writings resembling the distinction of paradigmatic and syntagmatic. See J. D. Apresjan, Principles and Methods of Structural Linguistics (The Hague: Mouton, 1973).