Introduction

This book was compiled by Saussure's students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye from their fellow students' lecture notes and published three years after his death. Saussure draws a series of far-reaching distinctions: between langue, the system of signs shared by a whole society, and parole, the individual's concrete act of speaking; and between 'synchronic' study, of a language system at one moment, and 'diachronic' study, of its change through time. The linguistic sign, he argues, has two sides, the 'signifier', a sound-image, and the 'signified', a concept, and the link between them is 'arbitrary': there is no natural connection between the concept 'tree' and the sounds that name it. Language is a system in which the value of each element lies not in itself but in its difference from the others: 'in language there are only differences.' These ideas founded modern linguistics and gave rise to twentieth-century structuralism, influencing anthropology, literary criticism and philosophy.