Linguistica e filosofia del linguaggio in Saussure

Abstract

In his Conférences inaugurales à l’Université de Genève (November 1891), Saussure anticipates some issues at the core of linguistic and semiotic research today, in particular the connection between language, speech and the biological structure of the human being. According to the Genevan Master of signs, language diversity is strongly related to the interaction between the continuity of speech and historical and geographical realities. Speech is a propulsive force ensuring the life and transmission of historical-natural languages. The natural faculty of language is explicated through the socio-historical condition of the speaker. This accounts for the peculiarity of human semiosis and expands the horizons of linguistics no longer considered to be exclusively the scientific study of verbal languages but also the study of all sign systems, and also involves cognitive issues. Saussure places the verbal in a wider mental background, in a non-verbal domain of thought which is open to the world of perceptions. Saussurean linguistics is compatible with philosophy of language when it explores the external margines of verbal and non-verbal signs as well as the most profound conditions of linguistics itself and of semiotics, thereby correcting ante litteram certain standpoints taken by Structuralism.