Saussure And Key Concepts

This essay attempts to give a simplified summary of Saussurean ideas from the first two chapters of Course in General Linguistics using examples from everyday life.

7 min readOct 23, 2020

Course in General Linguistics is a collection of lectures of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand Saussure published in French, in the year 1916, posthumously by his students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. The ideas that Saussure expounded about studying language as a structure in his lectures influenced many significant works in various other fields outside linguistics such as the works of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Not only that but to understand the core of structuralism as well as radical post-structuralist geniuses like Derrida or anti-establishment thinkers like Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, it is crucial to have an understanding of Saussurean ideas. This establishes the relevance of looking at the key concepts in the Course in General Linguistics even a century later of its publication.

Before we dive into his concepts it is integral to understand that Saussure’s ideas intervened the conventional diachronic approach to the study of language. In the years prior to him, linguists were mainly concerned with studying the languages from a historic point of view. This involved tracing the possible origins, their process of development over time and connections between different languages. Saussure advocated a synchronic approach. This approach puts aside the historical concerns to pay attention to how a language works and functions at a particular point in the time.

He stressed that language should be studied like a structure, a closed system. The vehicle of literary expression is language, hence, this argument had a great influence on the field of twentieth-century literary criticism. It is important to understand what we understand by the word ‘structure.’ A structure consists of components or its constituents.

The constituents of the structures do not have the same meaningful existence outside the structure that they have within it, hence it is fair to say that the constituents are subordinate to the structure. It can also be added that the constituent parts derive their relevance within the structure. But this relevance is not derived out of any intrinsic or innate characteristic that they possess, but because of the relation of one to another, among themselves. Saussure also meant that these relations between the constituent parts of a structure are guided by rules which are arbitrary because they are like fingerprints to that structure itself, not in need of any external validation as they are self-regulated.

Let us take an everyday example to understand what was stated above. Consider a building and a disorganised pile of pebbles. The building is made of floors, pillars, roof, doors and windows. If we take one of the constituents, let’s say a pillar, it will not hold the same meaning or significance outside the building, as a separate entity. While a pebble is still a pebble outside the pile. Hence a building can stand for our understanding of a structure while a disorganised pile of pebbles is not a structure but just an aggregate.

Saussure provides a critique of treating language as a “naming process — a list of words, each corresponding to the thing it names” (Saussure 65). The linguistic sign, according to him, does not unite a name and a thing but a concept and the sound image. We have to be careful that the sound image here doesn’t mean physical sound but the psychological imprint of the sound upon our senses. He coins the word signifier for the sound image and signified for the concept. A linguistic sign hence consists of signifier and signified. Here is an example. Take the word ‘dog’, it is the sign. The concept i.e. the signified is: ‘a four-legged animal that barks ’. The signifier is the sound image: ‘/dɒɡ/’.

We can say that Saussure outlined four properties of the sign. The arbitrariness of the sign, the linear nature of its signifier and the mutability and immutability of the sign.

Let’s look at these in detail. The first principle about the sign is that it is arbitrary since there is an arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified. Saussure argues that there is no intrinsic, natural or inherent relationship between any particular signifier and its signified. It is the matter of convention that the sound image ‘/dɒɡ/’ leads us to the concept of ‘a four-legged animal that barks’.

Saussure clarifies that by the term arbitrary he doesn’t mean that it is left to the speaker to choose the signifier randomly. By arbitrary he means that the link is unmotivated, that is there is an absence of a natural connection. Any signifier is as good as another. The four-legged animal that barks could have the signifier as ‘/kat/’ instead of ‘/dɒɡ/’ if it was not a matter of convention. This is very evident from the fact that the concept’s sound image varies from one language to another. For the concept of ‘a four-legged animal that barks’ the sound image in Hindi is ‘/ˈkutːɑ/’ and in German ‘/ˈhʊndə/’.

Saussure addresses the possible objections that might be raised against principle 1, i.e. the principle of arbitrariness. He states that onomatopoeic words and interjections are two kinds of words that might be pointed out to prove that the choice of the signifier is not always arbitrary. He further argues that occurrences of such words are very few. In addition to that, they are not organic elements but results of phonetic evolution. In this way, he refutes the possible objections.

It is important to point out here that Saussure meant that a signifier can signify not through its attachment to a particular concept (signified), but through its relationship with other signifiers within a particular language system. In other words, language functions just like a structure, where its constituent parts, word sounds, in this case, derive meaning not with reference to the world outside the structure, but solely with reference to their relation to each other. So, the language is a structure and to study it one has to treat it like a sign system.

Now, let’s touch upon two important ideas of Saussure. That is the langue and parole. The distinction between them is significant to attempt language studies in the manner Saussure is arguing. Any system has a set of basic principles, guidelines or conventions that govern or regulate it. That is what he means by langue. At a particular point in time, an act is performed guided by the langue. This individual utterance is parole. It is the shared quality of langue that makes individual paroles understandable. For example when I utter: “ My name is Rishita.” it is an individual utterance, parole. While the grammatical rules and syntax it follows, due to which it is understandable to both of us, the writer/speaker and the reader/listener, is the langue.

Let us take another example. The game of cricket. Any cricket match played, anywhere in the world will follow a certain set of rules and conventions which forms the langue of the system called cricket. Dhoni striking a six in a particular match, is like the individual utterance, is the parole. This idea of Saussure is significant as it was extended to other fields like arranging literary texts into genres or different forms. To substantiate this one can say that Lolita can be called parole if the notion of novels is considered to be the langue.

Now we come to his second principle about the nature of signifier. He says the signifier is linear because it is auditory hence unfolds solely in time. Hence the signifier represents a span which is measurable in one dimension. That is, it is a line. This linearity is more clearly visible in written text because the succession in time here is represented by the “spatial line of graphic marks (Saussure 70)”. He, therefore, states that signifiers form a chain.

The third and fourth important principles that Saussure expounded about the sign were immutability and mutability of the sign. He argues that a linguistic sign is mutable and immutable at the same time. On the surface, the argument he makes here looks contradictory or sounds impossible. But both the parts are true in their respective contexts. The linguistic sign is powerless in front of time as it can change over time. The principle of arbitrariness is what gives scope for this mutation. But it is also true that it is immutable in the sense that if one person decides to call a ‘building’ as a ‘dog’, no matter how many times, it will not change.

Hence, Saussure’s argument stands right that “the masses have no voice in the matter, and the signifier chosen by language could be replaced by no other (Saussure 71).” The fact that language is historically inherited by generations does not allow for any widespread change. There are four reasons put forward for the immutability of the sign. One, the arbitrariness protects it from the mutation. Two, there are too many signs, this multiplicity of signs in the system is one of the reasons for immutability. Three, language is a very complex system with its own sense of logic and everyday users are ignorant of it, this will require the intervention of the experts. The last and the fourth reason is what Saussure calls the collective inertia for innovation because language is so pervasive in everyday life and everyone uses it.

Saussure stressed that the language is a closed sign system and the way it is arbitrary and relational and constitutive. This greatly influenced the structuralists “because it gave them a model which is self-contained, in which individual items relate to other items and thus create larger structures” (Barry 45).

Works Cited

Saussure, Ferdinand.Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Wade Baskin, edited by Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy, Columbia University Press, 2011.

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Fourth ed., New Delhi, Viva Books, 2018.

Saussure And Key Concepts

This essay attempts to give a simplified summary of Saussurean ideas from the first two chapters of Course in General Linguistics using examples from everyday life.

Works Cited

Suggested Readings

Written by Rishita Acharya