Ferdinand de Saussure 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 his ideas have had a monumental impact throughout the humanities and social sciences.
The Cours de linguistique generale, reconstructed from students' notes after Saussure's death in 1913, founded modern linguistic theory by breaking the study of language free from a merely historical and comparativist approach. Saussure's new method, now known as Structuralism, has since been applied to such diverse areas as art, architecture, folklore, literary criticism, and philosophy.
1996 wurden in der Orangerie des Genfer Stadthauses der Familie unbekannte Notizen Ferdinand de Saussures entdeckt. Ein bedeutender Anteil der neu aufgefundenen Manuskriptfragmente kreist um die Frage der Identität sprachlicher Einheiten und damit um die Frage nach Gegenstand und Methode der Sprachwissenschaft. Obgleich sie sich weithin bereits publizierten Notizen Saussures – wie den Notes Item und den Notizen zu den Vorlesungen über allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft – zuordnen lassen, erlauben sie einen faszinierenden Blick auf den Prozeß der begrifflichen Entfaltung der Saussureschen Sprachidee. Der überraschende Fund läßt an die Stelle der starren strukturalistischen Systematik des Cours de linguistique générale das facettenreiche Bild eines unorthodoxen Sprachdenkens treten.
The notes taken by Saussure's student Emile Constantin were not available to the editors of the published Cours de linguistique générale (1916), and came to light only after the second world war. They have never been published in their entirety. The third and last course of lectures, of which Constantin kept this very full record, is generally considered to represent a more advanced version of Saussure's teaching than the earlier two. It is clear that Constantin's notebooks offer a text which differs in a number of significant respects from the Cours published by Saussure's original editors, and bring forward ideas which do not emerge in the 1916 publication. They constitute unique evidence concerning the final stages of Saussure's thinking about language. This edition of the notes is accompanied by an introduction and a full English translation of the text. There has been no attempt made by Komatsu and Harris, to turn the English into readable prose. Constantin's notes, even as revised by their author, retain the infelicities, repetitions, abruptness - occasionally incoherences - that betray the circumstances of their origin. The volume constitutes an important landmark in the history of modern linguistics and provides essential documentation for all scholars and libraries specializing in the subject.