Ferdinand De Saussure Quotes

I’m almost never serious, and I’m always too serious. Too deep, too shallow. Too sensitive, too cold hearted. I’m like a collection of paradoxes.

Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.

Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.

Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law

Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.

Las costumbres de una nación tienen repercusión en su lengua y, a su vez, la lengua es la que en gran medida hace a la nación.

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.

For the study of language to remain solely the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable state of affairs. In practice, the study of language is in some degree or other the concern of everyone. But a paradoxical consequence of this general interest is that no other subject has fostered more absurd notions, more prejudices, more illusions, or more fantasies. From a psychological point of view, these errors are of interest in themselves. But it is the primary task of the linguist to denounce them, and to eradicate them as completely as possible.

I'm almost never serious, and I'm always too serious. Too deep, too shallow. Too sensitive, too cold-hearted. I'm like a collection of paradoxes.

articulated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, is “the arbitrariness of the sign,” the wholly conventional pairing of a sound with a meaning. The word dog does not look like a dog, walk like a dog, or woof like a dog, but it means “dog” just the same. It does so because every English speaker has undergone an identical act of rote learning in childhood that links the sound to the meaning.

Barthes referred to semiology, the science of signs, in pursuing this task. He followed Ferdinand de Saussure’s claim that a sign is merely the outcome of an arbitrary relationship between a signifier (a word, picture, utterance) and a signified (a concept or mental image to which the signifier gives rise) – implying that the words we use have no fixed meanings in themselves. De Saussure called this ability of the sign to represent or convey meaning signification.

In the second half of the twentieth century, however, such seemingly self-evident or logical claims to identity have been problematised radically on a number of fronts by such theorists as Louis Althusser, Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. Collectively, their work has made possible certain advances in social theory and the human sciences which, in the words of Stuart Hall (1994:120), have effected 'the final de-centring of the Cartesian subject' (cf. Chris Weedon, 1987; Diana Fuss, 1989; Barbara Creed, 1994). Consequendy, identity has been reconceptualised as a sustaining and persistent cultural fantasy or myth. To think of identity as a 'mythological' construction is not to say that categories of identity have no material effect. Rather it is to realise—as Roland Barthes does in his Mythologies (1978)—that our understanding of ourselves as coherent, unified, and self-determining subjects is an effect of those representational codes commonly used to describe the self and through which, consequendy, identity comes to be understood.

A idéia de elaborar uma ciência dos signos, batizada, na sua origem, como semiologia ou semiótica, e que serviria para estudar os diferentes tipos de signos que interpretamos, integrando-os numa tipologia e encontrando as leis de funcionamento das diferentes categorias de signos, essa idéia é recente e remonta ao principio do nosso século. Os seus grandes precursores foram o lingüista suíço Ferdinand de Saussure (1857- 1913), ma Europa e o cientista Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), nos Estados Unidos.