Subscribe to Read | $0.00
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Read Anywhere and on Any Device!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
[image error]Q: I’ve recently become particulary interested in structural linguistics, more specifically laryngeal theory. I’m wondering if anyone has read something on why the original laryngeals have disappeared? ...assuming they existed, of course.And then my A: All I’m familiar with regarding structural linguistics is the foundational text of Saussure’s, Course in General Linguistics, which when I read it a few year ago I mostly found to be tedious and unsurprising. I can appreciate it as a
Short of calling it a pioneer text, it's difficult to really say much else about Saussure's Course in General Linguistics. As dated as most of the ideas contained within this book are, most of them stand as the founding concepts of linguistics, semiotics, and structuralism. Or, a more grammatically apt way to put it would be to say that it is Saussure's particular methodology that has been the most influential aspect of his thought. His central aim above all else is to analyze language as a syst...
Can't believe it took me so long to read this! It's so foundational to so much theory, and when you read it you will see how (it's not the same hearing about that, but isn't that always true?). And only reading it did I fully realize that I wasn't reading Saussure at all, but what his students and colleagues thought was Saussure, which clearly is something different and quite collective and thus possibly cooler than Saussure. So no one should just throw the name around as he's not a person anymo...
It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of this book. It is significant not only for laying down a radical vision of linguistics as a discipline for the 20th and 21st centuries, but it also lays the foundations for all modern approaches to semiotics. Certainly Peirce had made a similar breakthrough in semiotics at around the same time, but his theory was not backed up by such a rich understanding of the study of linguistics - its sub-fields and divisions, the progress it had made, it...
After wrapping up my readings of Heidegger and Husserl, I found Saussure to be rather refreshing, probably the most influential thinker on my large critical theory reading list since Gramsci. Backing up just a little bit, Heidegger really seemed to have just contributed a convoluted discussion of the word Dasein and its meaning, which at different times could encompass being, revelation, existence, human being, the universe, etc. I feel Heidegger is too open to interpretation and a discussion of...
A classical study of linguistics that laid the foundation of the modern science. A bit heavy on examples that break up the flow of the text, but a must-read for anyone interested in studying language and meaning.
This is not actually a work by de Saussure, but rather (a translation of) a posthumous reconstruction of his teaching by Bally and Sechehaye based on student notes of three separate courses of lectures (given between 1906 and 1911) plus some other writings of de Saussure; nevertheless, it is one of the founding texts of what is now known as "structural linguistics." I took an introductory course in structural linguistics at Columbia about 1973, or more than sixty years after this material was de...
This is an interesting book. The thinker behind the ideas within it was dead when it was written, and it was composed by former students from lecture notes. While reading it, one begins to presume a singular, living voice behind the ideas within; ideas that have been discussed, dissected, and evaluated to the point where this original formulation has lost its currency and its value is now that of an artefact or touchstone. The sad thing of monuments is that they are never free from piss; the fac...
I want to preface this by mentioning that I only read the parts of this text that seemed to be about semiotics, rather than the parts about linguistics as such. De Saussure's text is really important to the foundations of semiotics as a discipline, and I was especially pleased to get clarification on the relationship between the sign, the signifier, and the signified. Otherwise, he had some smart insights on various things, but I think a general intro to semiology would be as useful. Obviously d...
I did it for you Sammie.
