The implications of Saussure’s technique for dealing with linguistic analysis extend far beyond the boundaries of language, in ways which make the Cours de linguistique générale without doubt one of the most far-reaching works concerning the study of human cultural activities to have been published at any time since the Renaissance. It was an approach later to be exploited by theorists in such diverse fields as art, architecture, philosophy, literary criticism and social anthropology. In so doing, Saussure opened up a new approach to the study of many other human patterns of behaviour. For the founder of modern linguistics at the same time founded semiology, the general science of signs, within which linguistics was to be one special branch. But he plays a no less crucial role when his work is seen in a wider cultural context. This dual achievement suffices to explain Saussure’s pivotal place in the evolution of language studies. The other fact is that Saussure himself proposed answers to those questions which have remained either the basis or the point of departure for all subsequent linguistic theory within the academic discipline which thereafter claimed the designation ‘linguistics’. One fact is that Saussure, although only one among many Introduction to the Bloomsbury Revelations Edition xv distinguished linguists of his day, was the first to recognise the particular range of theoretical questions which had to be answered if linguistics was ever to take its place among the sciences. Saussure’s standing as the founder of modern linguistics remains unchallenged more than half a century after his death. The concepts we use are creations of the language we speak. On the contrary languages themselves, collective products of social interaction, supply the essential conceptual frameworks for men’s analysis of reality and, simultaneously, the verbal equipment for their description of it. Words are not vocal labels which have come to be attached to things and qualities already given in advance by Nature, or to ideas already grasped independently by the human mind. In the Cours de linguistique générale we see this new approach clearly articulated for the first time. For instead of men’s words being seen as peripheral to men’s understanding of reality, men’s understanding of reality came to be seen as revolving about their social use of verbal signs. The revolution Saussure ushered in has rightly been described as ‘Copernican’. With the sole exception of Wittgenstein, no thinker has had as profound an influence on the modern view of homo loquens as Saussure. It is a key text not only within the development of linguistics but also in the formation of that broader intellectual movement of the twentieth century known as ‘structuralism’. Introduction to the Bloomsbury Revelations Edition Roy Harris Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale occupies a place of unique importance in the history of Western thinking about man in society.
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