Selection from Course in General Linguistics - Ferdinand de Saussure (26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913)

 

• Saussure was a Swiss linguist.

• He is known as the founder of modern linguistics and structuralism.

• His intensive theories of language established new ways of studying human behavior and revealed

      strategies of modernist thought.

• He, like Aristotle, had his lectures written by his students.

• "He predicts the development of semiotics, the study of all sign systems, as a discipline that could shed

      light on the basic nature of social lif  e" (265).  

• Semiology the study of existing conventional, communicative systems.

• Semiotics is not in itself a literary theory, but evolves into structuralism.