Saussure and His Main Contributions 

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) was a Swiss linguist who occupies an important place in the history of linguistics. He was the pivotal figure in the transition from the 19th to 20th century, and is generally considered the founder of modern linguistics. Saussure was a classmate of Brugmann and Leskien, and an important figure in the young grammarians. He published a few highly respected papers, but his more influential work was published after his death. His students at the University of Geneva were so impressed by his lectures that they thought his ideas concerning linguistic questions were original and insightful and should be preserved. So his students collected and edited their notes and published his Courses in General Linguistic (Cours de Linguistique Generale) in 1916, three years after his death. That is to say, this book is a collection and expansion of notes taken by Saussure's students during various lecture courses that he gave. Understandablely, it is rather fragmentary in character, and in many places there are hints only in the theoretical position which subsequent exegesis has concluded and Saussure must have held. There is also very little in the way of detailed illustration of his views. But its influence has been unparalleled in European linguistics since then, and it has had a major formative role to play in the shaping of linguistic thought in Europe over the thirty years or so which followed its publication. This book became the most important source of Saussure's ideas and of his influence upon succeeding generations of linguists.
Few other figures in the history of the science of language have commanded such lasting respect and inspired such varied accomplishments as Ferdinand de Saussure. Leonard Bloomfield justly credited the eminent Swiss professor with providing “ a theoretic foundation to the newer trend in linguistics study," and European scholars have seldom failed to consider his views when dealing with any theoretical problem. Jonathan Culler (1976) says, “Ferdinand de Saussure is the father of modern linguistics, the man who reorganized the systematic study of language and language in such a way as to make possible the achievements of twentieth-century linguists. This alone would make him a Modern Master: master of a discipline which he made modern."
De Saussure was responsible for three key directions in the study of language. First, he broke with the young grammarians by pointing the distinction between historical linguistics and the state of language at any point in time. He was determined to delimit and define the boundaries of languge study. To this end he began by distinguishing between historical linguistics and descriptive linguistics, or diachronic and synchronic analyses respectively. The distinction was one that comparative philologists had often confused, but for Saussure landing, subsequently for linguistics it was essential. Synchronic linguistics sees language as a living whole, existing as a “state" at a particular point in time. It is descriptive linguistics that concerns with the state of a languge at any point in time, especially the present. Once linguist has isolated a focus—point for
synchronic description, the time factor becomes irrelevant. Whatever changes may be taking place in their material, they are considered trivial. To consider historical material is to enter the domain of diachronic linguistics. It is the study of language history and change. This was the type of work that characterized most of Saussure's predecessors because the crucial question about language, at least until the 19th century, revolved around discovering the origin of language. Diachronic linguistics deals with the evolution of a language through time, as a continually changing medium—a never-ending succession of language states. Thus we may wish to study the change from Old English to Middle English, or the way in which Shakespeare's style changed from youth to maturity: both would be examples of diachronic study. Saussure drew the inter-relationship of the two dimensions in the way:

C

A

B

D

Here AB is the synchronic “axis of simultaneities"; CD is the diachronic “axis of successions". AB is a language state at an arbitrarily chosen point in time on the line CD (at X); CD is the historical path the language has traveled, and the route, which it is going to continue traveling.
This distinction is significant because synchronic analyses were either ignored or overlooked in the past, and most importantly, the distinction drew attention to the current structural properties of language as well as historical dimensions. Language system is complete and operates as a logical system or any point in time regardless of influence from the past. A language has an existence separate from its history. People who speak it constitute the language at any point in time and, of course, they are ignorant of its history.
This led to de Saussure's second contribution; the distinction between language and parole. Language is such a complex and varied phenomenon that it would be impossible to study it without assuming some basic operating principles. Saussure made a distinction among three main senses of language, and then concentrated on two of them. He envisaged language (human speech as a whole) to be composed of two aspects, which are called langue (the language system) and parole (the act of speaking). Langue was considered by Saussure to be the totality of a language, deducible from an examination of the memories of all the language users. Langue, then, is an abstract system that all of us have in common and enables us to speak. It is the cognitive apparatus that members of a community share that allows them to use the vocabulary, grammar, and phonology in order to actualize speech. Langue is what the individual assimilates when he learns a language; it exists in the mind of each speaker. “It is the social product whose existence permits the individual to exercise his linguistic faculty." It is certainly a mentalistic concept of language system. Saussure argued strongly that the characteristics of langue were really present in the brain, and not simply abstractions. Langue is also something which the individual speaker can make use of but cannot be affected by himself; it is a corporate, social phenomenon. Parole, on the other hand, is the “executive side of language." Parole, is the actualization of langue. It is the way we actually speak---the vocabulary, accent, and syntactic forms. That is to say, it is the actual, concrete act of speaking on the part of an individual, the controlled psychophysical activity, which is what we hear. It is a personal, dynamic and social activity, which exists at a particular time and place and in a particular situation, as opposed to langue, which exists apart from any particular manifestation in speech.
The distinction between Langue and parole is important. In distinguishing them, we are separating what is social from what is individual, and what is essential from what is accidental. If we study the phenomenon of speech we will find so many things, which are relevant to our study and the work will end up in confusion. If we concentrate on langue, then every aspect of language and speech fall into place within it. The distinction between langue and parole also has important implications for other disciplines as well. It is essential for any field of research to distinguish what belongs to the underlying system which makes possible various types of behavior and what belongs to actual instances of such behavior.
Saussure's third main theoretical contribution was to clarify the concept of a language system and many linguists feel that it was this facet of his thought that had the most profound influence on subsequent scholarship. He completed his tenets of structuralism. He showed that the principles of langue must be described synchronically as a system of elements composed of lexical， grammatical, and phonological components. The terminology of linguistics was to be considered relative to each other. In other words, an element of the linguistic system is meaningful only in relation to other elements. The most immediate and significant impact of de Saussure's structural theory was in the area of phonology. It led to the concept of the phoneme as a distinct and indivisible sound of a language. Although de Saussure's structuralism was crucial to the development of phonology, he was really interested in the larger and more abstract “system of signs." Linguistics was really the study of signs and their relationships. De Saussure characterized signs as a relationship between “concept" and “sound" to use de Saussure's words signified and signifier. Saussure called this relationship of signified to signifier a linguistic sign. The sign, for him, is the basic unit of communication, a unit within the langue of the community. Being a relationship, and part of langue, it is thus a mental construct but we must remember that Saussure considered such constructs as nonetheless real (he refers to the sign as a ‘concrete entity,' at one point). Langue, in this way, can be viewed as a system of signs. The linguistic sign is constituted by the structural relationship between the concept (e.g., “house"---the signified) and the sound of the word “house" (signifier). A language is essentially composed of such structural relationships, and the study of language is the study of the system of signs that express ideas. “Language," said de Saussure, “is a system of inner-dependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others" (de Saussure, 1959, p.114).
Two types of structural relationship in a language system presented by de Saussure are syntagmatic and associative. Syntagmatic relationships of a word are those relationships that can obtain with neighboring in a sentence. Associative structural relations pertain to the ways in which words can replace one another, and the ways in which they do not. These relationships are about how words and sounds are associated with each other and form part of the synchronic relationship within the language structure.
The influence de Saussure had on language was revolutionary. His work had a profound influence on many aspects of linguistics but synchronic analysis is one of the most radical because it turned language on itself. He argued that language was a closed and self-defining system, and his work caused linguists and scholars of language to look “inward" toward the internal mechanisms of language rather than “outward" to an empirical world. Language was structure-not function; it was form-not substance. The rewards of structuralism are significant. His theorizing led to the phonology of Jakobson (1962) and the generative syntax of Chomsky (1957). And his semiotics or “science of signs" had made great headway in understanding verbal and nonverbal modes of communication: images, musical sounds, rituals, and social conventions all constitute fascinating systems of meanings. Saussure was the intellectual impetus for relegation language to the realm of internal logic and structural mechanisms that had little concern for the vicissitudes of language in context, or of how people actually use language to accomplish social goals.

References
［１］Ellis, Donald G. (1992). From language to communication. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
［２］Lrystal, David. (1985). Linguistics. New York : Viking Penguin Inc.
［３］Hu Zhuanglin & Runqing Liu. (1989). Linguistics: A Course Book. Beijing: Peking University Press.
［４］Saussure , Ferdinand de. (1960). Course in General Linguistics. Beijing: China Social Science Publishing House.