#Quote
The ultimate law of language is, dare we say, that nothing can ever reside in a single term. This is a direct consequence of the fact that linguistic signs are unrelated to what they designate and that, therefore, 'a' cannot designate anything without the the aid of 'b' and vice versa, or, in other words, that both have value only by the difference between them.
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More Quotes by Ferdinand de Saussure
The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.
The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.
Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.
It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies upon psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent.
Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.
Within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage: these are syntagmatic relations, of which I have spoken.
Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.
Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.
It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.
A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.
