Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. Ferdinand de Saussure is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics, and one of two major founders (together with Charles Sanders Peirce) of semiotics, or semiology. One of his translators, Roy Harris, summarized Saussure's contribution to linguistics and the study of "the whole range of human sciences. It is particularly marked in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology."
Although they have undergone extension and critique over
time, the dimensions of organization introduced by Saussure continue to inform
contemporary approaches to the phenomenon of language. Ruqaiya Hasan argued that
"the impact of Saussure’s theory of the linguistic sign has been such that
modern linguists and their theories have since been positioned by reference to
him: they are known as pre-Saussurean, Saussurean, anti-Saussurean,
post-Saussurean, or non-Saussure".
Saussure had a major impact on the
development of linguistic theory in the first half of the 20th century with his
notions becoming incorporated in the central tenets of structural linguistics.
His main contribution to structuralism was his theory of a two-tiered reality
about language. The first is the langue, the abstract and invisible layer, while
the second, the parole, refers to the actual speech that we hear in real life.
This framework was later adopted by Claude Levi-Strauss, who used the two-tiered
model to determine the reality of myths. His idea was that all myths have an
underlying pattern, which form the structure that makes them myths. These
established the structuralist framework to literary criticism.
Saussure's
most influential work, Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique
générale), was published posthumously in 1916 by former students Charles Bally
and Albert Sechehaye, on the basis of notes taken from Saussure's lectures in
Geneva. The Course became one of the seminal linguistics works of the 20th
century not primarily for the content but for the innovative approach that
Saussure applied in discussing linguistic phenomena. "Language is a system of
signs that expresses ideas". A science that studies the life of signs within
society and is a part of social and general psychology. Saussure believed that
semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign, and he
called it semiology.