Ferdinand de Saussure 1857 – 1913

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist and semiotician whose posthumously assembled Course in General Linguistics (1916) became the foundational text of structural linguistics and, through it, of twentieth-century structuralism in anthropology, literary theory, and philosophy. After early work on Indo-European phonology that made his reputation as a young man, he taught for decades at Geneva, where his lectures on general linguistics were written down by students and edited after his death. His distinctions between langue and parole, signifier and signified, and synchrony and diachrony shaped the work of Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, and Derrida.

Ferdinand de Saussure was born in 1857 at Geneva, into a patrician Genevan family of natural scientists; his great-grandfather Horace-Benedict was the pioneering Alpine geologist. He studied Indo-European linguistics at Leipzig with Karl Brugmann and the Neogrammarians and at twenty-one published his Memoir on the Original System of Vowels in the Indo-European Languages (1879), which reconstructed by purely structural reasoning the laryngeals later confirmed when Hittite was deciphered in the twentieth century.

He took his doctorate at Leipzig in 1881, taught at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes in Paris from 1881 to 1891, and from 1891 held the chair of Sanskrit and Indo-European at Geneva. From 1907 to 1911 he delivered three cycles of lectures on general linguistics that he did not himself prepare for publication; the Course in General Linguistics (1916), edited from students' notebooks by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, was published three years after his death.

Saussure's distinctions between langue and parole, between synchrony and diachrony, between signifier and signified, and his thesis of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign supplied the conceptual basis of twentieth-century structural linguistics and, through Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, and Derrida, of structuralist and post-structuralist thought across the human sciences. He died at Vufflens-le-Chateau, near Geneva, in February 1913.