Saussure, Ferdinand de (1857–1913)

Though he made a major contribution to the comparative and historical studies which dominated nineteenth-century linguistics, Saussure is best known today for the development of a radically different conception of language and of the methodology of linguistics which became central to twentieth-century structural linguistics. According to this conception a language is a system of signs which are radically arbitrary, so that their significations are determined only by the historically constituted systems of conventions to which they belong – such a system Saussure called ‘la langue‘. It follows, therefore, that a linguistic study is first and foremost one of la langue, that is, of the conventional relations obtaining at a given time between signs belonging to the same system, rather than one of the development of linguistic forms over time, as the comparativists had maintained.