European structuralism finds its roots in the theoretical horizon opened by Ferdinand de Saussure. Yet, as Anne-Gaëlle Toutain and Ekaterina Velmezova observe, this origin is as much historical as it is problematic: “while such a conception corresponds to a historical reality, it nevertheless constitutes a theoretical and epistemological error.” The structuralists, they explain, misunderstood the content and the stakes of the Saussurean theorization of langue. By seeking to “implement and develop Saussure’s theory,” they paradoxically “blocked access to it by disseminating an erroneous representation of it.”
What distinguishes Saussure’s contribution is his radical redefinition of the sign. He broke with the traditional notion that opposed sound and idea. In De l’essence double du langage (1891) he wrote that “the deep dualism that splits language does not lie in the dualism of sound and idea, of vocal phenomenon and mental phenomenon; that is the easy and pernicious way to conceive it.” Instead, the distinction is between the vocal phenomenon as such and the vocal phenomenon as sign. This insight shifts the focus from given entities to the constitutive “points of view with the help of which we secondarily create things.” For Saussure, linguistic objects do not pre-exist observation; they are relational, born from the articulation of sound and meaning within a social system.
This relational nature of the sign is captured in the concept of value. The sign exists only through differential relations—each term defined not by its positive content but by what it is not. La langue thus appears “not as an entity, but as a functioning — the articulation of thought in phonic matter.” Sound, meaning, and sign are the effects of this functioning, not its pre-existing components.
Toutain and Velmezova stress that Saussure thereby abandoned the idea of language as a concrete object. La langue is not an entity but a social practice, “launched into circulation.” Its existence consists precisely in this circulation, what Saussure called its semiological life. The sign, defined by value, and the social character of langue together establish a “non-objectal mode of existence” — a language that lives through use and transmission, rather than through substance.
Within this new framework, Saussure introduced the semiological point of view. He insisted that what sets language apart from other semiological systems must be considered “the least essential” for its nature, and that the primitive contract or initial convention of philosophical tradition is not the heart of semiological facts. Instead, semiological systems are “social products and systems of values.” A semiological system, he wrote, “is comprised of a quantity of units … and the true nature of these units is that they are values. This system of units which is a system of signs is a system of values.”
Here lies the paradox: in redefining the sign and establishing the autonomy of la langue, Saussure also projected a broader science of signs—semiology—that would encompass languages as one among many systems. But this inclusion reintroduced, inadvertently, a taxonomic perspective that returned to the older, philosophical conception of the sign as something that stands for something else. Toutain and Velmezova note that this very ambiguity—between structural definition and classificatory ambition—was inherited by later structuralists. They adopted the semiotic view, but often misunderstood Saussure’s own theoretical rupture.
The semiological horizon that Saussure outlined would thus become both the foundation and the point of departure for twentieth-century semiotics. Structural linguistics was born from this tension: the desire to construct a scientific study of signs, and the persistent difficulty of grasping what Saussure had already redefined — the sign not as substance but as relation, and language not as object but as life, a semiological life.
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Reference: Anne-Gaëlle Toutain and Ekaterina Velmezova, Semiotics in Structural Linguistics, in Bloomsbury Semiotics: Semiotics in the Arts and Social Sciences, Vol. 3.