Abstract
The lecture notes of Saussure’s students published in 1916 with the title Cours de Linguistique Générale (hereafter ‘the Course’) were taken to be the best collection of Saussurean thought until the discovery of his own lecture notes and manuscripts in his father’s house in 1996. Based on these newly discovered materials, Bouquet and Engler published Ecrits de Linguistique Générale (‘Writings in General Linguistics’) in 2002. In the preface, comparing several quotations from the 1916 book and Saussure’s manuscripts, they make the following remarks:
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Notes
- 1.
However, other texts of Saussure will also be quoted for the purpose of illustration.
- 2.
Language as a ‘semi-closed’ system highlights the point that language as a system is subject to external influences which work on the system as a whole in triggering a reconstitution of the whole system. This semi-closedness somehow ensures that the system remains autonomous even though from time to time it undergoes changes due to external factors.
- 3.
To be sure, Saussure is aware of the existence of some motivated signs in the province of semiology such as mime, yet he thinks that a system with entirely arbitrary signs represents better the ‘ideal semiological process’ (1916/1983, p. 101), of which language is an example.
- 4.
This statement is challenged by later sociologists who study synchronic linguistic features in order to gain insights into diachronic language change. They point out the possibility of synchronic co-existence of more archaic and newer linguistic forms. This quotation serves as a good illustration: ‘What is missing in his [Saussure’s] conception, however, is the possibility of a moment in time when a more archaic gasti and a more innovating variant, gesti, did coexist in the minds of some very real speakers of the language.’ (Weinreich, Labov, & Herzog, 1968, p. 122)
- 5.
Due to copyright issues, here I use the diagrams published in Saussure (1916). The English translations of the French terms are listed below: Audition (Hearing), Phonation (Vocalization), Concept (Concept), Image acoustique (Sound pattern).
- 6.
Thibault draws on Gibson’s (1979/1986) discussion of ‘ecosocial space’ and position as ‘point of observation’ and makes the point that ‘speaker and listener are not simply physical objects who emit and receive sound waves in an abstract physical space, as in the code model; rather, they are located at positions in an ecosocial space of actual and potential points of observation and points of action’ (Thibault, 1997, p. 153).
- 7.
Joseph (1997) also criticizes Harris’s reading of Saussure as proposing a telementational model of communication. He points out that Saussure does not have a theory of communication and the word communication never occurs in the Course. For him, Saussure is best read as endorsing a view in line with structuralist literary criticism: ‘the real meaning of a text inheres neither within the intention of the author, nor within the minds of readers, but within the texts itself’ (Joseph, 1997, p. 36). By locating meaning within texts, or more exactly, the linguistic sign, this reading renders individual speakers and hearers, their thoughts and intentions secondary. He further explains: ‘the goal of reading is not telementation between reader and author, but as rich a construction as possible of the meaning that is latent within the text’ (ibid.).
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Zhou, F. (2020). Saussure: Langue as an Autonomous System. In: Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_2
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