Saussure's
Cours de linguistique générale has been one of the seminal books of the twentieth century, having shaped modern linguistics and semiology, and having importantly affected anthropology, philosophy and literary studies. Yet the book was written by Saussure's colleagues, based on student notes taken during the three occasions when Saussure gave his lectures on general linguistics. For Saussure's first course, the notebooks of Albert Riedlinger are certainly the best and the most detailed. They have loomed large in our knowledge of Saussurean linguistics, but a number of Saussure's statements, as recorded by Riedlinger, have never been known to a larger public. Until now, those notes themselves have been unavailable, except in fragmented and incomplete form in Engler's unwieldy and hard-to-find edition of the
Cours. Now, the best of the student notes to all three courses will be available for the first time as they were taken down in French, and have been provided with a facing translation, an introduction, and a full analytical index of terminology. With their publication, Saussurean scholars as well as students of linguistics and related disciplines will have at their disposal the most reliable source material for Saussure's thinking on language. It is hoped that this work will encourage those who take Saussure's principal ideas to be sufficiently known from the
CLG to reconsider Saussure's ideas in their greater immediacy and in their development, so as to appreciate nuances of his thinking generally unknown until now.
This edition presents Riedlinger's notes intact and in their original order. The notes are accompanied by an introduction and a full English translation of the text. Together with the other two volumes, it offers the best insight yet into the evolution of Saussure's thinking.
