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.
FUNDAMENTAL Fundamental text in Linguistics and semiotic theory. Good edition - cheap and easy to read.
Course in General LInguistics It's a classic and every teacher needs one. I was very glad to get this very nice copy quickly and cheaply. Thank you.
Foundation of modern Linguistics This text marks the beginnings of modern linguistics, and is a must for any linguistic bookshelf. This text is, surprisingly, somewhat difficult to find in bookstores, so I was happy to find this affordable copy at Amazon. I recommend this book, along with Bloomfield's Language, to anyone interested in the structuralist foundations of contemporary linguistics.
Ferdinand De Saussure = Father Of The Modern Sausage Ferdinand De Saussure was well known as the father of modern literary structuralism, but he was also an avid lover of the modern sausage! De Saussure, "the sausage" (as his good friends called him) was a fun loving linguist.
The Essential De Saussure ... The thirties of the last century cradled the birth and growth of structuralist Linguistcs in many horizons like phonology ,grammar , etc ... and if we were about to ask who embraced that stream , we would - undebatably - find the name of Ferdinand De Saussure.
This fine book of his explained his structural approach to language and established a series of theoretical distinctions that have become basic to the study of linguistics.
Saussure made a differentiation between the (actual speech) or what we call a spoken language ,and the knowledge underlying speech that speakers share about (what is) grammatical. For Saussure speech represents instances of grammar and the mission of the linguist is to find the underlying rules of a particular language from examples found in speech. this is different than the descriptivist's p.o.v ,since the structuralist sees grammar as a set of relationships that account for speech ,rather than a set of instances of speech.
Once you grasp the main concepts of this oeuvre you can go further by reading Bloomfield's works on Structuralism.
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