Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique g n rale was posthumously composed by his students from the notes they had made at his lectures. The book became one of the most influential works of the twentieth century, giving direction to modern linguistics and inspiration to literary and cultural theory. Before he died Saussure told friends he was writing up the lectures himself but no evidence of this was found. Eighty years later in 1996 a manuscript in Saussure's hand was discovered in the orangerie of his family house in Geneva. This proved to be the missing original of the great work. It is published now in English for the first time in an edition edited by Simon Bouquet and Rudolf Engler, and translated and introduced by Carol Sanders and Matthew Pires, all leading Saussure scholars. The book includes an earlier discovered manuscript on the philosophy of language, Saussure's own notes for lectures, and a comprehensive bibliography of major work on Saussure from 1970 to 2004. It is remarkable that for eighty years the understanding of Saussure's thought has depended on an incomplete and non-definitive text, the sometimes aphoristic formulations of which gave rise to many creative interpretations and arguments for and against Saussure. Did he, or did he not, see language as a-social and a-historical? Did he, or did he not, rule out the study of speech within linguistics? Was he a reductionist? These disputes and many others can now be resolved on the basis of the work now published. This reveals new depth and subtetly in Saussure's thoughts on the nature and complex workings of language, particularly his famous binary oppositions between form and meaning, the sign and what is signified, and language (langue) and its performance (parole).

A comprehensive overview of the development of language studies from the ancient Greeks through modern theorists, this book focuses on determining what the enduring issues in linguistics are, what concepts have changed, and why. Francis P. Dinneen, SJ, defines the basic terminology of the discipline as well as different linguistic theories, and he frequently compares underlying assumptions in contemporaneous science and linguistics. General Linguistics traces the history of linguistics from ancient Greek works on grammar and rhetoric through the medieval roots of traditional grammar and its assumption that there is a norm for correct speech. Dinneen marks the beginning of modern linguistics with Saussure's concept of an autonomous linguistic structure independent of socially imposed norms, and he details the theoretical contributions of Sapir, Bloomfield, Hjelmslev, Chomsky, Pike, and others. Dinneen considers the relative merits of the different theories and models, evaluating their claims and shortcomings. A thorough introduction to linguistics for newcomers to the field, this book will also be valuable to linguists, psychologists, philosophers, and historians of science for its evaluations of major theoretical concepts in light of enduring issues and problems in language studies.

This volume brings together the most important general linguistic writings by Mikolay Kruszewski (1851-1887), whom Roman Jakobson described as “one of the greatest theoreticians of language among the world linguists of the late nineteenth century”. Apart from reissuing a revised version of the late Robert Austerlitz' translation of the theoretical introduction of Kruszewski's Master's thesis on morphophonemic alternation in Old Slavic, first published in German in 1881, the bulk of the present volume consists of the first translation ever, by Gregory M. Eramian, of Kruszewski's doctoral thesis, Outline of Linguistic Science, supervised by J. Baudouin de Courtenay and submitted in Russian at the University of Kazan in 1883, which until now has been available only in German translation, published in Techmer's “Zeitschrift” (Leipzig, 1884-1890; reprinted Amsterdam, 1973). Together with a detailed introduction, a full list of Kruszewski's writings, a bibliography of secondary sources, including a reconstruction of the major works consulted by Kruszewski, and detailed indexes of biographical names, subjects & terms, and languages cited for examples, the present volume provides Western scholars with a solid textual and contextual basis for a proper reassessment of the ideas of arguably the most outstanding 19th-century linguistic thinker.

The fourth edition of General Linguistics provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to linguistics. The book considers: - semantics and pragmatics - dialect and style - phonetics and phonology - morphology and syntax, with reference both to traditional and current theories - comparative-historical linguistics and linguistic typology - linguistics' relation to other disciplines - the practical application of linguistics - the 2,500 years of linguistic thought that lies behind what we do and think today