Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose Geneva lectures on general linguistics, compiled and published posthumously by his students in 1916 as the Course in General Linguistics, founded structural linguistics. He argued that language should be studied as a self-contained system of signs defined by their relations to one another rather than by their history, distinguished the abstract system of a language, langue, from its use in actual speech, parole, and proposed that the link between a word's sound and its meaning is arbitrary rather than natural. These ideas shaped not only twentieth-century linguistics but structuralist thought across anthropology, literary theory and semiotics more broadly.