biography
| name: |
Saussure, Ferdinand de
|
pronunciation:
[sohsür]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1857–1913)
|
| biography:
| Linguist, the founder of modern linguistics, born in Geneva, SW Switzerland. He taught historical linguistics at Paris (1881–91), and became professor of Indo-European linguistics and Sanskrit (1901–13) and of general linguistics (1907–13) at Geneva. The work by which he is best known, the Cours de linguistique générale (1916, Course in General Linguistics) was compiled from the lecture notes of his students after his death. His focus on language as an ‘underlying system’ inspired a great deal of later semiology and structuralism. |
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