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Saussure's Contribution to Linguistics


Saussure’s Contribution to Linguistics

Saussure has made a significant contribution to linguistics. He has revolutionised linguistics. His name figures among the greatest linguists of the world like Panini, Chomsky and Bloomfield. He made linguistics synchronic, descriptive and structural. He pulled it out of the rut and made it methodological and objective. To him goes the credit for highlighting the importance 

1. Of seeing language as a living phenomenon    

2. Of studying speech rather than the written texts


3. of analysing the underlying system of a language to demonstrate an integral structure instead of isolated phonetic tendencies and occasional grammatical comparisons

4. Of making linguistic studies synchronic and fixing them firmly in the social milieu.

5. He exhibited the importance of different kinds of theoretical dichotomies in linguistic studies.

His great service to linguistics consists in establishing a series of rigorous distinctions and giving transparent definitions of certain concepts.

Saussure made linguists realise that language is a system based on a systematic arrangement of certain elements of various types put together in various ways in accordance with some principles of structure. His emphasis on syntagmatic relationships among structure has formed the focus of several linguistic theories and approaches developed after him.

Saussure’s greatest contribution was to draw a distinction between langue and Parole. It was the germ which led to the development of phonology as a new branch of linguistics which studies the distinctive functions of phonemes and their internal structural relationships.

Chomsky’s notion of competence and performance also owes a great deal to Saussure's distinction between langue and parole.
The most important concept that Saussure has given us is the notion of double entities which form the core of his theories. All other notions and distinctions in the Course and other works on linguistics emerge from this basic principle. He clearly looks upon speech in terms of double entities (formed of two parts) one part of which has no value without the other. According to him, everything in language can be defined in terms of two opposing terms:

1. The articulatory and the acoustic duality.

2. The duality of sound and sense.

3. The duality of the individual and the society.

4. The duality of langue and parole.

5. The duality of the material and the immaterial.

6. The duality of syntagmatic and paradigmatic

7. The duality of sameness and opposition.

8. The duality of synchrony and diachrony.

Referring to Saussure’s contribution to linguistics, Benvensite has made the following observation:
“A forerunner of doctrines which in the past fifty years have transformed the theory of language, he has opened up unforgettable vistas on the highest and most mysterious faculty of man.                        

Saussure’s studies of the associative value of signs were later expanded into techniques for determining not only the limits that separated a given signification from others but also led to the structuring of the entire vocabulary into semantic units. His proposals have been useful in the present day information theory. The linguistic field theory was also influenced by him. The huge amount of work done by the linguistic circle of Geneva particularly in the social aspect of language owes a lot to him. Though the linguistic circles of Copenhagen and Prague moved in different directions yet they owe a good deal to the original ideas contributed by Saussure.

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