Abstract
The Course in General Linguistics has played a foundational role in the development of structural methods within the humanities (philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and literary theory). Its main premise is that cultural signification can be studied in terms of relatively autonomous and self-organizing sign systems situated within the social world. Because of its broad focus on signification, the Course made it possible to study the ensemble of human culture in a systematic, comprehensive, and rigorous manner. The Course introduces a basic set of oppositional pairings between the signifying and the signified facets of a sign, between the language system (la langue) and speech (la parole), and between synchrony and diachrony. This approach allows for the study of any human phenomenon on the basis of a rule-governed system of contrastive and combinatorial relations between signifying elements. However, in the last sixty years, scholars have challenged the legitimacy of the Course itself. Previously, the Course was believed to be a simple recast of Saussure’s lectures on general linguistics, but the combination of critical works and direct access to Saussure’s private manuscripts allows for the Course to be called into question and examined anew.
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Notes
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References to the Course are to the 2013 Roy Harris translation of Cours de linguistique générale (Bloomsbury Academic). Unlike the Wade Baskin translation (published most recently by Columbia UP, 2011), the Harris translation preserves the pagination of the French edition in the margins; the French pagination is helpful for cross-referencing different editions of the Course (including the 1986 Roy Harris translation published by Open Court). (Note that, in contrast to the 1986 translation, the 2013 Bloomsbury edition has removed the mention: “Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye with the Collaboration of Albert Riedlinger” from the title page).
The 2013 Harris translation is cited here as follows: (Saussure 2013, [page number in the French edition] page number in the English text).
References
Engler, Rudolf, ed. 1989. Cours de linguistique générale, by Ferdinand de Saussure. Vol. 1. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. First published 1967–68.
Godel, Robert. 1957. Les Sources manuscrites du “Cours de linguistique générale” de F. de Saussure. Geneva: E. Droz.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1993. Troisième cours de linguistique générale (1910–1911): d’après les cahiers d’Emile Constantin/Saussure’s Third Course of Lectures on General Linguistics (1910–1911): From the Notebooks of Emile Constantin. Ed. Eisuke Komatsu. Trans. Roy Harris. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
———. 1996. Premier cours de linguistique générale (1907): d’après les cahiers d’Albert Riedlinger/Saussure’s First Course of Lectures on General Linguistics (1907): From the Notebooks of Albert Riedlinger. Ed. Eisuke Komatsu and George Wolf. Trans. George Wolf. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
———. 1997. Deuxième cours de linguistique générale (1908–1909): d’après les cahiers d’Albert Riedlinger et Charles Patois/Saussure’s Second Course of Lectures on General Linguistics (1908–1909). Ed. and Trans. Eisuke Komatsu and George Wolf. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
———. 2006. Writings in General Linguistics. Ed. Simon Bouquet and Rudolf Engler, with Antoinette Weil. Trans. by Carol Sanders, Matthew Pires, with Peter Figueroa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. First published in French 2002.
———. 2013. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. and annotated by Roy Harris. With a new Introduction by Roy Harris. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
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Stawarska, B. (2020). Recent Developments in Saussurean Linguistics. In: Saussure’s Linguistics, Structuralism, and Phenomenology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43097-9_2
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