Saussure, Ferdinand de

Saussure, Ferdinand de (1857–1913), born in Geneva. In 1891 he became professor at Geneva where, between 1907 and 1911, he delivered the three courses of lectures which were reconstructed from students' notes into the Cours de linguistique générale (published 1915), which is the basis of 20th-cent. linguistics and of much modern literary criticism. His most important and influential idea was the conception of language as a system of signs, arbitrarily assigned and only intelligible in terms of the particular system as a whole. (This idea was applied outside language in the new science called semiotics.) Language is a structure whose parts can only be understood in relation to each other; this ‘structuralism’ has been very influential in literary criticism and in other fields, such as sociology. Saussure's emphasis was on the value of synchronic study (with which the term ‘linguistics’ is sometimes used synonymously, as distinct from ‘philology’ for historical study), rather than the diachronic philology with which he had previously been concerned. One of the compilers of the Cours was Charles Bally (1865–1947), who developed the ideas of Saussure and, with other followers, is sometimes assigned to the ‘Geneva School’.