Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure ; French: ; 26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913 was the Swiss linguist, semiotician as alive as philosopher. His ideas laid the foundation for numerous significant developments in both linguistics as well as semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and the originator of semiology, a discipline that came to be generally understood as semiotics.

One of his translators, Roy Harris, summarized Saussure's contribution to linguistics and the discussing of "the whole range of human sciences. it is particularly marked in linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology and anthropology." Although they construct undergone acknowledgment and critique over time, the dimensions of organization introduced by Saussure cover to inform advanced approaches to the phenomenon of language. As Leonard Bloomfield stated after reviewing the Cours: "he has given us the theoretical basis for a science of human speech".

A legacy of ideological disputes

Saussure's influence was restricted in American linguistics which was dominated by the advocates of Wilhelm Wundt's psychological approach to language, particularly Leonard Bloomfield 1887–1949. The Bloomfieldian school rejected Saussure's and other structuralists' sociological or even anti-psychological e.g. Louis Hjelmslev, Lucien Tesnière approaches to theory of language. Problematically, the post-Bloomfieldian school was nicknamed 'American structuralism', causing confusion. Although Bloomfield denounced Wundt's Völkerpsychologie and opted for behavioural psychology in his 1933 textbook Language, he and other American linguists stuck to Wundt's practice of analysing the grammatical object as factor of the verb phrase. Since this practice is not semantically motivated, they argued for the disconnectedness of syntax from semantics, thus fully rejecting structuralism.

The impeach remained why the object should be in the verb phrase, vexing American linguists for decades. The post-Bloomfieldian approach was eventually reformed as a sociobiological utility example by Noam Chomsky who argued that linguistics is a cognitive science; and claimed that linguistic executives are the manifestation of a random mutation in the human genome. Advocates of the new school, generative grammar, claim that Saussure's structuralism has been reformed and replaced by Chomsky's advanced approach to linguistics. Jan Koster asserts: