Volume 2017, Issue 217 - Special Issue on the 100th anniversary of the publication of the Cours de linguistique générale, Guest Editor / Rédacteur du numéro: Russell Daylight

Saussure’s theory of language as a process of differential and contextual signifying opens up the possibility of analyzing and interpreting not just verbal language but all phenomena taken to be significant, whether verbal, visual, acoustical or otherwise accessed. In so doing his work transcends the fashions of structuralism and poststructuralism that first made him widely known, and is not just situated in the past but points to the future.

Résumé Après l’épisode philologique et la découverte de nouveaux manuscrits, la figure et l’œuvre de Ferdinand de Saussure apparaissent beaucoup plus riches et complexes. Le Saussure d’aujourd’hui “se détache,” se retire de ce qu’il lui est arrivé, malgré lui, de devenir: le chef de file d’une linguistique forte, centrée exclusivement sur la langue , ou sur le système. Aujourd’hui son penser revient interroger la sémiolinguistique de même qu’il le fit en son temps avec la linguistique comparée. “Sciencesdu langage”: c’est la définition employée par le linguiste suisse lui-même qui saisit l’esprit scientifique saussurien mieux que “linguistique générale,” cette dernière conduisant plutôt vers un abandon tacite des langues réelles, de leur différence et de leur mobilité. Une critique avant la lettre de la majeure partie du Structuralisme se réclamant précisément de Saussure.

Saussure’s quest for constitutive features of language resulted in his formulation of two fundamental principles: first, the bipolarity of the sign, according to which neither form nor meaning of a sign exists as of itself, outside of their mutual relation; and second, the arbitrariness of that relation, i.e., the fact that their link is based solely on convention. The purely relational nature of language, the fact that its entities have no positive identity of their own result in the unceasing development of language whose direction and results can be neither programmed nor predicted. In the first half of the twentieth century, Saussure’s idea of language as a pure “structure” was interpreted in a static way, as a matrix of relations whose elements occupy secure positions in the overall relational network. When critique of the structural approach has been raised in the 1960–1980s, Saussure’s champions tried to distance Saussure’s “genuine” views, ostensibly expressed in his private papers, from his posthumously published Course , which was declared unreliable or even falsified. The present paper argues that the problem with interpreting Saussure arises primarily from the way his works were read by different generations and in different intellectual contexts. Saussure’s work needs to be examined in the context of its own time, as an integral part of the philosophical revolution of the turn of the twentieth century.

Stawarska 2015 The Course in General Linguistics presentes contemporary scholars of Saussure’s linguistics with a performative paradox: as in the case of any other Great Book, a critical study of this posthumously ghostwritten text contributes to its canonization. That is why one can offer a scholarly critique of the Course without diminishing the established legacy of this foundational text. The contribution of this essay is indeed chiefly critical: I reconstitute the process of ghostwriting – and reviewing – the Course by its two editors, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, in order to raise doubts about book’s being a reliable statement of Saussure’s linguistics. I argue specifically that the received “official doctrine” articulated in the Course and appropriated within structuralism, which is based upon a set of oppositional and hierarchical pairings between la langue and la parole , synchrony and diachrony, is rendered suspect in light of the book’s complicated editorial history. This “official doctrine” emerged out of an institutional interest to establish general linguistics as a recognizable academic discipline with proper object and method; its enduring status as an unrivaled truth of Saussurianism can be deciphered by investigating the interrelation between dominant discourses and social relations of power.

Arbitrariness is commonly seen as a major concept in Saussure’s thought, and it even receives the status of a “principle” in his theory. It is not only the characteristic feature of the relation between the signifier and the signified (the semiological relation is arbitrary), but moreover it is constitutive of this very relation (the relation is semiological because it is arbitrary; there is a so-called “semiological relation” established between a signifier and a signified because of the principle of arbitrariness). And when linguists and other Saussurean interpreters comment on the concept of arbitrariness, they usually imply a binary relation: the semiological relation is arbitrary due to the fact that the signifier is arbitrarily chosen vis-à-vis the signified, and vice versa . I will be questioning the latter assertion in this paper. In my opinion, the symmetry of the semiological relation has not been properly demonstrated. The signifier can be seen as arbitrary with regard to the signified, but no reason has been provided to recognize the converse. Instead a number of arguments can be put forth to see arbitrariness as a concept that implies a non-symmetrical relation.

Writing is a subject to which Saussure has paid close attention throughout his career. However, many thoughts developed on the topic by the linguist in his manuscripts do not fully emerge in the Cours de linguistique générale . This article aims to elaborate on the evidence of Saussure’s careful considerations on the subject of writing, which are inherited from the reading of the Cours de linguistique générale . It attempts to show that, because it allows linguistic and semiological approaches, writing is one of the major issues among Saussure’s thoughts. Also, it focuses on one of the questions that the linguist details in his writings: the analogy between the system of language and the system of writing. This article invites to explore anew the topic of writing in Saussure’s works taking into account the diversity of views developed by the linguist on this subject, and the diversity of the writing systems he studies.

Résumé Ferdinand de Saussure postule une science générale des signes qu’il ap-pelle sémiologie. La langue n’en serait qu’un cas particulier caractériée par l’arbitrariété totale de ses unités. Cette caractéristique reviendrait aussi à l’écriture qui n’est cependant pas un systéme sémiologique primaire, mais un système secondaire dont la fonction est de représenter un système pri-maire (la langue). Il existe en outre des systèmes tertiaires comme, par example, l’alphabet Morse, l’écriture Braille, les systèmes de chiffrage, etc. Les modes de manifestation peuvent être soit acoustique soit visuel. Tandis que la langue et l’écriture sont totalement arbitraires, les autres systèmes sémiologiques peuvent être motivés jusqu’à un certain de-gré. À côté des sémiologies utilitaires il existe aussi des sémiologies esthé-tiques comme, par example, les légendes. La sémiologie elle-même n’est qu’un cas particulier de la sémiotique qui tient aussi compte des signes (ou indices) naturels. Les frontières entre langue, sémiologie et et sémiotique sont souvent flottantes et imprécises.

In his three courses of lectures on general linguistics given between 1907 and 1911, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) sometimes drew diagrams and figures on the chalkboard to add a visual dimension to the novel and challenging theoretical concepts he was laying out. Those which the editors redrew for inclusion in the Cours de linguistique générale (1916) – in some cases with significant changes – have had a surprisingly strong impact on readers ever since. If Saussure hoped that the drawings would clear up ambiguities in his verbal text, he might have been disappointed; for while they extend a hand to students and readers to guide them into his conceptual world via the stepping-stones of the semi-familiar, accessible and concrete, they have opened up whole new realms of ambiguity, and strengthened the ones already present in the verbal text. This article examines seven of the illustrations or sets of illustrations in the CLG and the various interpretations to which they have given or could give rise, treating these not as erroneous but as contrapuntal to the text when the two appear to be in contradiction.

One of the less obvious contributions of Saussure is his role in establishing modern communications theory. The sender-message-receiver (SMR) model of communication was developed by Shannon and Weaver (1949, The mathematical theory of communication . Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press). Within the humanities, it is Roman Jakobson’s version of the SMR model that is most influential. Jakobson’s model creates a methodology for considering such complexities as the sender’s intentions, the context of transmission, metalinguistic codes, the transmission medium, and the relation to the referent. Despite the complexity of Jakobson’s model, it is still bound by the assumption that perfect communication can be achieved through the full recovery of contexts. The most thorough and powerful critique of what’s often called the “transmission model” of communication is found in Jacques Derrida’s “Signature Event Context.” Derrida’s critique begins by demonstrating “why a context is never absolutely determinable” (1988a: 3, Signature event context. In Gerald Graff (ed.), Limited inc., Samuel Weber (trans.) , 1–23. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press). In place of context, Derrida proposes the notion of “dissemination” in which a text is radically adrift of the conditions of its utterance or reception. At face value, Saussure’s “speech circuit” model represents an early and underdeveloped model of communication. As if often the case, however, a closer reading of the Cours reveals something far more radical and profound. Closer attention to Saussure’s speech circuit model re-opens many questions in communication theory, and in associated fields such as literary theory, cultural studies, and semiotics.

Dans cet article, je publie un texte écrit par Ferdinand de Saussure en octobre 1906 et correspondant à une proposition de programme pour le premier cours de linguistique générale qui commença le 16 janvier 1907. Ce texte a été présenté aux séances de la Faculté de Lettres et Sciences sociales de l’Université de Genève à l’occasion des discussions à propos de la succession de Saussure sur la poste d’enseignement de linguistique générale de Joseph Wertheimer. Ce document constitue la première source saussurienne confirmée de ce premier cours et s’achève, en outre, sur quelques lignes décrivant ce qui sera un deuxième cours. L’histoire saussurienne raconte, en fait, que des trois cours de linguistique générale de Saussure (1907–1911), nous ne disposons de notes manuscrites de Saussure lui-même que pour les deux derniers cours. Je reconstruis donc l’histoire du début des cours saussuriens qui furent la source du Cours de linguistique générale et je publie le document avec des annotations inhérentes à l’histoire et à la philologie saussurienne. Cette introduction au premier cours doit être ajoutée à toutes les autres sources inhérentes au Cours de linguistique générale.

This article examines the degree to which the appeal of the CLG lies in its language.

In his Geneva lectures in November 1891, Saussure stated a sort of “paradox of the will,” saying: “Can linguistic facts be said to be the result of acts of will? That is the question. The current science of language gives a positive answer. However, one should add immediately that … the linguistic act, if I might call it that, is characterized as being the least reflected on, the least premeditated, as well as the most impersonal of all.” This issue – shared with Michel Bréal – remains important in Saussure’s thought until the end, and it is possible to read some of the most important pages of his works in the light of this paradox – a kind of free will problem in a linguistic fashion. Such a focus on the will opens a different perspective on semiology (“For the distinguishing characteristic of the sign – but the one that is least apparent at first sight – is that in some way it always eludes the individual or social will”– as we read in the Course ), reassesses the status of notions like “institution” and “arbitrariness” and allows a (critical) comparison with other paradigms in the current debate of social ontology (e.g., Searle’s account).

Saussure’s mid-career involvement in psychologist Theodore Flournoy’s study of the renowned psychic Catherine Elise Müller (alias Hélène Smith) brought him into contact with imaginary languages. Flournoy asked Saussure to see what he could make of some transcriptions of Müller’s trance induced speech, which she had claimed was in Sanskrit or the language of the inhabitants of Mars. Saussure assisted Flournoy in his research from 1896 to 1899 looking for linguistic qualities of Müller’s strange utterances. In doing so found support for Flournoy’s theory of teleological automatism, a process in which unconsciously stored information could be recalled for the purpose of manifesting so-called psychic phenomena. While this episode of Saussure’s career has often been treated as a peculiarity, it is also worth considering points of continuity between Saussure’s analyses of Müller’s glossolalia and the rest of his career. In this essay I will discuss how several of the psychological underpinnings of major concepts expressed in the Cours de linguistique générale found exercise and elaboration as Saussure considered the problem of how Müller assembled her mysterious utterances.