Ferdinand de Saussure (1916), ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye with Albert Riedlinger, Lausanne and Paris: Payot — https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2139804W
Key takeaways
Read in the third-edition text (NOTE-594); the 1916 printing was not reached.
- The object. Langage is heterogeneous; linguistics takes as its object langue, the social system of signs deposited in a community’s brains and complete only in the mass, and sets parole, the individual act, aside. Linguistics is to be part of a general science of signs, sémiologie.
- The sign and its two principles. The sign joins a concept (signifié) and an acoustic image (signifiant), both psychic. The bond is arbitrary, meaning unmotivated, not chosen by the speaker; onomatopoeia is marginal. The signifier is linear, a chain in time.
- Immutable and mutable for the same reason. Because the sign is arbitrary there is no rational ground on which a community could debate changing it, so it holds by tradition; and nothing anchors it against the shifts in the bond between signified and signifier that time brings.
- Synchrony against diachrony. Change strikes isolated elements without aiming at the system, and the resulting state is fortuitous; a state is, like a chess position, independent of how it was reached. Synchronic regularities are general but not imperative, diachronic events imperative but not general.
- Value. A term’s signification does not fix it; its value comes from its relations to the coexisting terms (French mouton against English sheep and mutton; redouter, craindre, avoir peur). Signified and signifier, taken apart, are purely differential, “sans termes positifs”; the sign as a whole is a positive fact, and signs stand in opposition.
- Syntagmatic and associative relations organise every state, and relative motivation (dix-neuf against vingt) limits arbitrariness to different degrees in different languages.
Filed as THEORY-159: the claim about value, with what it does not say.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-09 at the owner’s request, as one of the works in the reference list of the owner’s working manuscript (October 2026) that the record did not yet hold. See the curation entry of that day. Read the same day.
As first filed, this note said the value of a term is “purely differential”, “rather than by any positive content”. The book says that only of signified and signifier taken separately, and calls the sign as a whole “un fait positif”; the wording above follows the book.
The text is not Saussure’s own: the first-edition preface describes it as the editors’ “recréation” from students’ notes of the three Geneva courses. The nearest readings in the record are the compositional distributional models of meaning (LIT-273, LIT-272), which fix a word’s meaning by its relations to other words; the line from this book to them runs through work the record does not hold, and the connection is mine.