República Bolivariana de Venezuela

Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Educación Universitaria

Universidad Nacional Experimental Simón Rodríguez

General Linguistic. Unit III

Activity two

Curso: Lingustica General

Facilitador: Adriana Villamizar
Participante: Camacaro Canelon Diego Armando

Febrero, 2021
Ferdinand de Saussure’s biography
Swiss philologist born in Geneva in 1857, died in 1913 considered the founder
of linguistics, in his research he enunciated the language dichotomy | speech,
which is considered the starting point of structuralism for conceiving the
language as a system of elements and rules of combination among them
acceptable by the community of speakers who use it to communicate.

Saussure considered that the linguistics of the nineteenth century did not deeply
question what language is or how it works, so he decided to focus on the
research of the language itself.

In his Course of General Linguistics Saussure proposes to leave aside the

study of language from a historical perspective Philology and analyze it from the
structural point of view.

Saussure’s approach argues that all words have a material component (an
acoustic Image) which he called significant and a mental component referred to
the idea or concept represented by the signifier he called meaning. Significant
and meaning make up a sign. The definition of Saussure’s linguistic sign
includes only two components and is no more complex than the one used in the
nomenclature that he himself criticized due to its simplicity. Indeed, he admits
the division of the sign into two parts, since he considers that the division
proposed by the nomenclature was attractive, however, he emphasized that the
processes involved in the Language should be avoided. Finally, this definition of
linguistic sign will be completed when the acoustic image is given the name of
the signifier and the mental concept with which said acoustic image
corresponds.