1916: Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
Technically, this book wasn’t written by Saussure himself: it’s made up of notes collected by students during Saussure’s lectures at the University of Geneva from 1906 to 1911. Still, this is one of the founding texts on semiotics and structuralism, giving us the lowdown on the concept of the sign and highlighting the arbitrary (yep, it’s that word again) relation between signifier and signified.
Critics have argued that, by adopting a full-on structural approach, Saussure portrayed language as a closed system and failed to consider the social and historical contexts in which signs are used. Thoughts? How have other critics responded?
Saussure distinguished langue (language) from parole (speech), with langue referring to the rules that govern language and parole referring to specific usages of language. Saussure focused on langue, as he believed that it’s the underlying structures of a system that are the most important. However, other theorists (such as V. N. Voloshinov) have reversed this priority. For what reasons might we choose to focus on speech? What do you see as the pros and cons of these two approaches?