Ferdinand de Saussure Quotes on Mind
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. This page collects quotes attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure on the topic of mind, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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“Language is a system of signs that express ideas.”
p. 16 ; Partly cited in; Geza Revesz , The Origins and Prehistory of Language , London 1956. p. 126 -
Attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure:
“The linguistic sign unites a concept and a sound-image.”
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“The causes of continuity are a priori within the scope of the observer, but the causes of change in time are not. It is better not to attempt giving an exact account at this point, but to restrict discussion to the shifting of relationships in general. Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law.”
p. 77 -
“A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass of thought engenders a system of values.”
Cours de linguistique générale(1916) | p. 120