Saussure, Ferdinand de (1857—1913) Swiss linguist, one of the founders of semiotics and a crucial influence on the development of structuralism. Born in Geneva, Saussure studied in Leipzig, Berlin, and Geneva. He taught in Paris for several years, before taking the chair of linguistics at the University of Geneva. He only published one work in his lifetime, a massive study of the vowel system in Indo-European languages, which appeared in 1878. However, it is the lecture courses he gave between 1906 and 1911, assembled from student notes by his former students and published posthumously as Cours de linguistique générale (1916), translated as Course in General Linguistics (1959), which brought him lasting fame. Saussure and his students are sometimes referred to as the Geneva School. Although trained as a philologist, Saussure realized that the history or etymology of particular words does not explain either their actual origin or their contemporary meaning. This observation gave rise to two crucial hypotheses: first, that the association of a particular sound and a particular word and its meaning is arbitrary (there is no intrinsic reason that the word for the object we call a bat should either be bat or sound like ‘bat’); second, these arbitrary choices are governed by a general system of meaning-making that is universal (i.e. common to every language). This distinction between language as it is used (parole) and its rules of use (langue) underpins the entire so-called structuralist revolution. Taking this allegory distinction a step further, Saussure argued that the spoken word has to be considered a sign comprising two elements---signifier and signified---which, in a famous phrase, he said were like opposite sides of a single sheet of paper. The signifier is the actual acoustic sound, e.g. ‘bat’, which must be distinguishable from other sounds and repeatable, while the signified is the concept we arbitrarily associate with that sound (bearing in mind that different languages can associate different concepts with ostensibly the same sounds). What is important to note here is that Saussure does not define the signifier as pointing to a thing in the world (referent). Structuralism was born from the intuitive leap made by people like Lévi-Strauss, Claude (in anthropology) and Lacan, Jacques (in psychoanalysis) that other human constructed systems---kinship, the unconscious, films, and so on---could be seen to behave ‘like a language’ in this respect. Further Reading: J. Culler Ferdinand de Saussure (1986).