Saussure终极版.ppt

Saussure Modern Linguistics 瞿康莉 罗丽荣 General Introduction to Saussure Ferdinand de Saussure (26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. Saussure is widely considered to be one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics and of semiotics(符号语言学), and his ideas have had a monumental impact throughout the humanities and social sciences. Biography He was born in Geneva, in 1857, Switzerland. By age 15, he had learned Greek, French, German, English, and Latin. At the age of 21, Saussure studied for a year in Berlin, where he wrote his only full-length work. He returned to Leipzig(莱比锡城)and was awarded his doctorate in 1880. Afterwards he relocated to Paris, where he would lecture on ancient and modern languages for eleven years. In 1891. living in Geneva, teaching Sanskrit（梵文）and historical linguistics, he married there and had two sons. It was not until 1906 that Saussure began teaching Course in General Linguistics that would consume the greater part of his attention until his death in 1913. His Major Work ——Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique générale) is the influential book compiled by Charles Bally and , that is based on notes taken from Ferdinand de Saussures lectures at the University of Geneva between the years 1906 and 1911. It was published posthumously(死后出版的) in 1916 and is generally regarded as the starting point of structuralism, an approach to linguistics that flourished in Europe and America in the first half of the 20th century. Saussure’s theories SIGN theory Saussure believed that language is a system of signs that express ideas . Sounds count as language only when they serve to express or communicate ideas; otherwise they are nothing but noise. To communicate ideas, they must be part of a system of conventions, part of a system of signs. This sign is the union of a f