The Cours de linguistique generale, reconstructed from students' notes after Saussure's death in 1913, founded modern linguistic theory by breaking the study of language free from a merely historical and comparativist approach. Saussure's new method, now known as Structuralism, has since been applied to such diverse areas as art, architecture, folklore, literary criticism, and philosophy.

Author Biography

Ferdinand de Saussure was the Maitre de Conferences at the Ecole Practique de Hautes Etudes in Paris and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Geneva. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Leipzig, where he studied Indo-European languages. Ferdinand de Saussure's influence can be seen in linguistics, literary theory, philosophy and the social sciences.