Course in General Linguistics

A book published three years after Saussure's death, reconstructed by his colleagues Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, with Albert Riedlinger, from students' notes of three courses he gave in Geneva between 1907 and 1911. It founded modern linguistics and, later, structuralism. Saussure separates langue, the shared system of a language, from parole, individual acts of speaking, and makes the system the object of study. He also separates synchronic study of a language at one moment from diachronic study of its change over time, and gives priority to the former. The linguistic sign unites a signifier, a sound pattern, with a signified, a concept, and the link between them is arbitrary. A sign has value only through its differences from other signs in the system: in language there are no positive terms. Signs relate along two axes, in sequence and by association with absent alternatives. Saussure also proposes semiology, a general science of signs.

Its ideas of the sign, signifier and signified and meaning through difference underlie structuralism, semiotics and post-structuralism, so readers of Barthes, Lévi-Strauss or Derrida need it.