John E. Joseph (ed.), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Saussure, New York / London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2025, 416 p., ISBN 978-1-3503-7978-7, 28 bw ill., 175 $
Notice de l’Éditeur, avec table des matières.
Ce livre est disponible en ligne sur Bloomsbury Collections (abonnement requis)
To call Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) the father of modern linguistics, and one of the two parents of semiotics, is obviously metaphorical, and while founder may seem less so, in a literal sense Saussure never founded anything. His contributions to modern semiotics amounted, in its formative period, to a few pages – incredibly rich pages, but sparse. If modern linguistics is Saussurean, he never saw it practised, apart from his own lectures and the masses of manuscripts he left unpublished, with small hints of it in some of his publications. The latter do not include that foundational document of modern linguistics, the Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics, abbreviated henceforth as CLG), which, although it bears his name as its author, he did not compose, let alone publish. The story is well-known of how his colleagues Charles Bally (1865–1947) and Albert Sechehaye (1870–1946) compiled students’ notes of his lectures, along with notes of his own, wrote the book and published it in 1916, three years after his death.
He died forgotten by most linguists, despite having once had considerable renown on account of a book which he wrote as a student, when by rights he ought to have been focusing on getting his degree. The Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (Memoir on the original system of vowels in the Indo-European languages, 1879) overturned the eld he was studying, and promised a great career – which he then managed to sabotage at almost every opportunity. He recognized this and regretted it, and he died with no expectation of his work being appreciated. That it would not only be remembered but have such a spectacular afterlife, with generations of scholars devoted to its exegesis, is little short of a miracle.
This was a man who never believed the science was settled. On the contrary, he thought that very little in the science of language could be accepted at face value. Where the boundaries lay between various basic terms related to language, linguists had not bothered to settle, though some had made an initial effort. Linguists imagined language as starting from a set of sounds, in the way that alphabetic writing was invented to capture, and these sounds then combine to form words, which in turn combine to form sentences. Saussure began by questioning whether sounds as such really matter at all. Rather, what matters is the system they form – a system in which the differences between elements are what count, rather than the sound elements in their own right.
Extrait de la préface par J. E. Joseph, p. XIV-XV.
L’ouvrage sera présenté par John Joseph à l’occasion de l’AG 2025 du Cercle, le 20 septembre à l’Université de Lausanne, salle CD106 du Château de Dorigny.
