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Glossary

• État de langue or ‘language-state’: to have no extension along the time dimension.

• Historical linguistics: a relatively simple, even beguiling affair of describing one isolated event after another.

• Synchronic description: is a much more serious and difficult occupation, since here there can be no question of presenting isolated anecdotes.

• Signs: represented by the divisions marked off by dotted lines, and each sign being the union of a significant with a signifié.

• Signifiant: a signifier or portion of speech-sound.

• Signifié: a signified or portion of meaning.

• Historical sound-changes: intrinsically independent of systems that can occur when the dropping consonants in word-final position, dropping word-final labiodentals fricatives and dropping word-final alveolar fricatives.

• Language: an example of the kind of entity which certain sociologists call ‘social facts’. Exists perfectly only within a collectivity.

• Parole: speaking.

• Langue: the general system ‘language’. In syntax, it is a social fact  that no individual knows his mother-tongue completely.

• Syntagmatic relations: the ways that linguistic units can be combined into longer constructions.

• Paradigmatic relations: the relationships between elements that can substitute for one another in same ‘slot’ in a linguistic structure.

Ferdinand de Saussure Biography

Ferdinand de Saussure was born in Geneva, France, in 1857. He was the first scholar who defined the notion of ‘synchronic linguistics’ and ‘diachronic linguistics’. Saussure was trained as a linguist of the convectional, historical variety, and became outstandingly successful as such at very early age in his Mémoire sur le systéme primitive des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (1878), published one week after his twenty-first birthday while he was a student in Germany.

At the end of 1906 he was persuaded to take over responsibility for a course on General linguistics and the history and comparison of the Indo-European languages, 1908-9 and 1910-11. In the first of these years Saussure limited himself exclusively to historical matters; but when he gave the course for the second time he included and introduction which dealt rather briefly with synchronic linguistics, and in the third course, finally a full semester was devoted to theoretical. An then, no long afterward, in 1913, he died, without having published any of his theoretical material. But two of his students, Charly Bally and Albert Sechehaye, decided to reconstruct a book that they published as the Cours de linguistique générale (Saussure, 1916).