Ecrits de linguistique generale

Abstract

That honored contributor to the nineteenth-century disciplines of historical and comparative philology and inventor of such twentieth-century ones as semiotics and structural linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, is often cast as the erratic discoverer who never made the most of his own insights. We hear that Saussure's enunciation of the principle of functional opposition in his Cours de linguistique générale, though clearly and memorably made, left the hard work of systematization to be done by Trubetzkoy and the phonologists of the Prague Linguistic Circle; the consequences of the "zero sign," alluded to fleetingly in the Cours, had to be drawn by Jakobson in the 1930s; the definition that makes language "a form and not a substance" is surrounded in the Cours by such muddled uses of the terms "form" and "substance" that it took Hjelmslev's glossematic approach to sort out the issue into the tetrad of form/substance // content/expression (these examples are drawn from the copious commentary by Tullio de Mauro that makes up the last third of Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, eds. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Riedlinger, Paris: Payot, 1980). And even worse, we often catch Saussure in flagrant contradiction of his own theories. As Jacques Derrida commented in 1967, it is often necessary "to read Saussure against Saussure" (De la grammatologie, Paris: Minuit, 1967, 77; for similar expressions see also 67, 81, 86, 96, 105-106).

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