One hundred years after the Course in General Linguistics: a review of the work of Ferdinand de Saussure

Abstract

In 1916, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics was published posthumously. In this work, his disciples, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, collected the Geneva teacher’s lessons that have come to us until our days. Specifically, well-known concepts such as langua-ge/speech, synchrony/diachrony... and, of course, the concept of linguistic sign. It have been a century since this work that is considered foundational of so-called Eu-ropean structuralism was published; our goal is to review these concepts as they were ex-pressed then, so that the aim is to make a critical analysis on some current interpretations which, to our understanding, distort the primeval saussurean concept. Also, other aim is to contextualize  some  of  the  objectives  that  have  been  traced  in  this  work  according  to  the  linguistic theory (or, rather, ideology ) of the moment and hope to pick up the most relevant contributions of postsassurean structuralism.