Writings in General Linguistics (review)

This is basically a translation, into accurate and readable English, of the collection edited by Simon Bouquet and Rudolf Engler, published by Gallimard in 2002. It therefore joins together all the drafts and notes by Saussure known from Engler's earlier edition of the Cours de linguistique générale (1968-1974) with a further batch of manuscripts discovered in 1996, in the orangery of his family home in Geneva. The present edition adds a useful introduction by Carol Sanders (pp. xviii-xxx), and a bibliography, mainly compiled by Sanders and Matthew Pires, of secondary works on Saussure published between 1970 and 2004 (pp. 241-327). The 'organgery manuscripts' are less than a third of the whole. Apart, however, from some miscellaneous fragments (pp. 63-6 85-90), they include an assortment of drafts, translated here as 'On the dual essence of language' (pp. 3-60), which are the nearest Saussure ever got to writing a book of his own on the foundations of linguistics. They wrestle repeatedly with problems that the Cours was later to make central: that linguists deals with units that can be established only 'negatively', and that changes are between 'states' of a language. But they date from a time when he was evidently searching for appropriate terminology. It is not, for example, until a note for his second course of lectures (1908-1909) that the term 'sign' is used of a unit with two 'sides' (p. 208). In these drafts it is still a form with 'vocal elements' (p. 18), which as such has a 'meaning': that is, something more like what was to become the 'significant'. Since it has been made clear already that 'both signs and meanings only exist by virtue of the 'difference between signs' (p. 20), one is tempted to wonder if the change to later usage was so very important. The translation, for which Sanders and Pires are again responsible, is very well done. Readers must accept, among other things, that 'langue' is now a technical term in English, and must bear in mind, in particular, the distinction between 'phonologie' and 'phonétique' current in France at the beginning of the twentieth century. Otherwise they will not understand why, for example, 'phonology' is independent of linguistics in general (p. 55 and elsewhere). But one unhelpful gallicism is perhaps the expression 'the speaking subject'. Saussure does rarely mean 'the speaker': someone speaking, that is, on a specific occasion. But there is no play of words, as in the work of Emile Benveniste half a century later, on 'subjects' and 'subjectivity'. In other places Saussure simply means 'a speaker': someone, that is, who in general speaks a language in question.