Saussure, Ferdinand de

The Reception of Saussure in the Light of the 1916 Edition of the Cours de Linguistique GÉnÉrale (CLG)

The reception of Saussure's work has been largely based on the posthumously published edition of the Cours de Linguistique Générale (1916) [hereafter CLG] that was edited and published by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger. Significantly, Riedlinger was the only one of these three individuals who actually attended and made notes on the lectures on general linguistics that Saussure gave between 1907 and 1909 at the University of Geneva. The significance of this fact lies in the way in which so many of the interpretations and assumptions about Saussure's thinking have been based on a text that, thanks to the editorial hands of Bally and Sechehaye, has substantially played down, altered, or omitted important aspects of the lectures, and their organization, that Saussure gave to his students at the University of Geneva. Readers may refer to the reviews of CLG by Jules Ronjat (1916), André Oltramare (1916), and J. Wackernagel (1922) for a sense of the early reception of the 1916 edition.

Moreover, a substantial body of previously unpublished notes and manuscripts by Saussure on diverse areas of research that occupied him at various stages throughout his career, as well as new editions of the CLG, based on the notes of the students who attended the lectures, have helped to shed light on a much richer, more complex, more diverse, and more dynamic thinker than the posthumous version of the CLG that was bequeathed to posterity by Bally and Sechehaye in 1916.

In the following sections, Saussure's work will be examined in terms of a number of different thematic areas that representing the major areas in the development of his thinking about language, seen as a semiological system of signs.

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