#Quote
More Quotes by Ferdinand de Saussure
Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.
Any psychology of sign systems will be part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively social; it will involve the same psychology as is applicable in the case of languages.
The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.
In general, the philological movement opened up countless sources relevant to linguistic issues, treating them in quite a different spirit from traditional grammar; for instance, the study of inscriptions and their language. But not yet in the spirit of linguistics.
A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.
Of all social institutions language is least amenable to initiative. It blends with the life of society, and the latter, inert by nature, is a prime conservative force.
In the lives of individuals and societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other. For the study of language to remain solely the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable state of affairs.
It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.
The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.
Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families, within which very diverse relations obtain but belonging to a single category: these are associative relations.
