The Cambridge Companion to Saussure

Introduction

This chapter offers a historical and theoretical perspective. A comprehensive understanding of Saussure's ideas requires some idea of how other linguists at the time dealt with the same topics. Only in this way can the novelty of his theory become clear, a novelty of which contemporary linguists were not fully aware. The key notions that are addressed in this chapter - system, arbitrariness and value - are at the very heart of Saussure's objectives, and are abstract and theoretical, even more so than other concepts in the CLG.

Saussure’s teachings were collected and reorganised, as is well known, from several sources, with the addition of unfinished personal papers and drafts. They are to be seen as the result of his previous efforts over many years concerning descriptive linguistics, and thus arise in fact from his own practice. The purpose of this new teaching (i.e. general linguistics) was not to put forward new data or discoveries about such and such a language, as Saussure did for instance when teaching Sanskrit or Gothic, but to confront the difficulties involved in making something worthwhile out of this mass of ‘facts’ from many languages, already fully described by linguists during the previous century. This, briefly speaking, was the goal of general linguistics among scholars at that time, although in Saussure’s opinion it was far from being achieved, or indeed fully initiated.