(剑桥指南) The panion to Saussure.pdf.pdf

panions Online ? Cambridge University Press, 2006 Introduction: Saussure today Carol Sanders Why, still today, do we?nd the nameof Ferdinand de Saussure featuring promi- nently in volumes published not only on linguistics, but on a multitude of topics, volumes with titles such as Culture and Text: Discourse and Methodology in Social Research and Cultural Studies (Lee and Poynton, 2000), or the intriguing Plastic Glasses and Church Fathers (Kronenfeld, 1996)? It is to this question that the present volume attempts to bring at least a partial answer, by looking afresh at the intellectual background to Saussure’s work, the work itself, its impact on European structuralism in general and linguistics in particular, and its changed but continuing in?uence today. Thetitles above, then, are enoughto showthat nearly a century anda half after his birth, the ideas of this Swisslinguist andthinker still excite interest. Heis best known for his Cours de linguistique g ′en ′erale , edited after his premature death from the notes of students who had attended his lectures and ?rst published in 1916. This ‘Course in general linguistics’ has gone through numerous editions in France, hasbeentranslated into numerouslanguages, andhashadanin?uence far beyond the area of linguistics. This book, however, is far from being the sole reason for his importance as a thinker, the recognition of which has gone through various phases since his death. In his own lifetime, he was regarded – and regarded himself – primarily as a historical linguist who had made his mark with a brilliant and precocious study in Indo-European linguistics. At the turn of the eenth and twentieth centuries, general linguistics, as a discipline that examines how language works and how best to describe the current state of a living language (as opposed to tracing the history of past language states), was barely constituted; Saussure was one of the main thinkers who contributed to establishing the principles of the disciplin