![]() While this theory of lost sounds, subsequently called laryngeals, was admired in de Saussure’s lifetime, the absence of any direct evidence for these sounds prevented its acceptance by scholars. In the Mémoire it is boldly hypothesized that certain apparently divergent aspects of the Indo-European system of vowel alternations (the socalled ablaut system, which still survives in English in such vowel changes as the present sing, the preterite sang, the past participle sung) can be explained in accordance with the dominant regularities, if one assumes that certain sounds had formerly existed and produced certain effects before being lost. The Mémoire is a brilliant tour de force, whose basic method foreshadows the fundamental structuralist notion of language as an organized system, the central doctrine of de Saussure’s mature thought. He was awarded his doctorate at Leipzig in 1880, taught at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris from 1881 to 1891, and taught subsequently at Geneva for the remainder of his career.ĭe Saussure’s fame rests almost exclusively on two works-his earliest, the Mémoire sur le systéme primitif des voyelles dans les langues indoeuropéennes (1879), and the posthumously published Cours de linguistique générale (1916). ![]() ![]() ![]() He was born in Geneva, where he received his secondary and university education. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), Swiss linguist, was the chief forerunner of structural linguistics. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |