Saussure_生平及理论简介

,单击此处编辑母版标题样式,单击此处编辑母版文本样式,第二级,第三级,第四级,第五级,*,单击此处编辑母版标题样式,单击此处编辑母版文本样式,第二级,第三级,第四级,第五级,*,单击此处编辑母版标题样式,单击此处编辑母版文本样式,第二级,第三级,第四级,第五级,*,Saussure&Modern Linguistics,General Introduction to Saussure,Ferdinand de Saussure,(26 November 1857 22 February 1913)was a,Swiss,linguist,whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in,linguistics,in the 20th century.,Saussure is widely considered to be,one of the fathers,of 20th-century linguistics,and of,semiotics,(,符号语言学,),and his ideas have had a monumental impact throughout the,humanities,and,social sciences,.,Biography,In 1857,born in,Geneva,From 18751876,he studied,Latin,Greek,Sanskrit,and a variety of courses at the,University of Geneva,;,From 18761878,graduate work at the,University of Leipzig,;,From 18781879,he studied for a year at,Berlin,;,In 1880,he was awarded his,doctorate,in Leipzig;,From 18801891,，,he taught in Paris;,From 18911913,，,he lectured on Sanskrit and Indo-European at the University of Geneva,His Major Work,Course in General Linguistics,(,Cours de linguistique gnrale,)is the influential book compiled by,Charles Bally,and,that is based on notes taken from,Ferdinand de Saussure,s lectures at the,University of Geneva,between the years 1906 and 1911.,It was published posthumously,(,死后出版的,),in 1916 and is generally regarded as the starting point of,structuralism,an approach to linguistics that flourished in,Europe,and,America,in the first half of the 20th century.,Arbitrary Nature of Signs,The basic principle of the arbitrariness of the sign(,larbitraire du signe,)in the extract from,Course in General Linguistics,is:,there is no natural reason why a particular,sign,should be attached to a particular,concept,.,Or:the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning.,For instance,we cannot explain why a book is called a/buk/and a dog a dg.,Point 1,It is Saussures argument that it is only the consistency in the system of signs that allows,communication,of the concept each sign signifies.,In Figure 2 above,the signified tree is impossible to represent because the signified is entirely,conceptual,.There is no definitive(,ideal,archetypical,)tree.Even the picture of a tree Saussure uses to represent the signified(concept)is itself just another signifier(image).,The object itself-a real tree,in the real world-is the,referent(,指示对象,),.For Saussure,the arbitrary involves not the link between the sign and its referent but that,between the signifier(sound image)and the signified(concept)in the interior of the sign.,Thus,the linguistic sign is then a two-sided psychological entity that can be represented by the drawing:,The two elements are intimately united,and each recalls the other.,Point 2,Saussure goes on to argue that if words stood for pre-existing concepts they would have exact equivalents in meaning from one language to the next and,this is not so,.Different languages divide up the world differently.,Example:,In,English,we have different words for the animal and the meat product:,Ox,and,beef,in,French,buf,is used to refer to,both concepts,.A perception of difference between the two concepts is,absent,from the French,vocabulary,.,In Saussures view,particular words are born out of,a particular societys needs,rather than out of a need to label a pre-existing set of concepts.,Point 3,There are some misunderstandings about the onomatopoeic(,拟声词、声喻法的,)effect on the arbitrariness of language.,Objection:,Onomatopoeia:words that sound like the sounds they describe,e.g in Chinese,叮咚，轰隆，叽里咕噜,and in English hiss(snakes),twitter(swallows),croak(frogs),Saussure recognised that his opponents could argue that with onomatopoeia there is a direct link between word and meaning,signifier(sound image)and signified(concept).,As a matter of fact,arbitrary and onomatopoeic effect may work at the same time.,The,poem,also demonstrates very clearly the concept of the sign as a two sided psychological entity,since it is impossible to read the nonsense words without assigning a possible meaning to them.,We naturally assume that there is a signified(concept)to accompany the signifier(sound image).,Example:,The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.,它成了夏夜蚊蚋,(rui),嗡营的港湾。,Keats,Ode to a Nightingale,Can we replace,murmurous,with,murderous,just because they are the similarsounding words,？,No,.“It is only when you know the meaning that you infer that the form is appropriate.”,This also applies to many cases of the so-called onomatopoeic words.,Point 4,What then is the link between a linguistic sign and its meaning?,It is a matter of CONVENTION.,Arbitrariness,of language makes it potentially creative,and,conventionality,of language makes learning a language laborious.,English idioms such as,as cool as a cucumber(,极为冷静,),，,to have ones heart in ones mouth(,战战兢兢,),may not look or sound,logical,but we cannot change the expressions any other way,for it is conventional to say things in this way.,For learners of a foreign language,it is the conventionalit