Book review

Review of Ferdinand de Saussure: Storia di una teoria del linguaggio. By Emanuele Fadda & Giuseppe Cosenza.

Rome: Carocce, 2026. ISBN 978-88-290-3533-5 (pb) 310 pp. € 29

Swiss scholars have always held pride of place in Saussurean studies. Charles Bally (1865–1947) and Albert Sechehaye (1870–1946) assembled the Cours de linguistique générale (Saussure 1916Saussure, Ferdinand de 1916 Cours de linguistique générale. Ed. by Charles Bally & Albert Sechehaye, with the collaboration of Albert Riedlinger. Paris and Lausanne: Payot. (2nd ed. 1922; subsequent eds essentially unchanged). Critical ed. by Rudolf Engler, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1967–74. Annotated Italian trans. by Tullio De Mauro, Bari: Laterza 1967 French ed. with De Mauro’s notes trans. by Louis-Jean Calvet, Paris: Payot 1972 English version, Course in General Linguistics, trans. by Wade Baskin, New York: Philosophical Library 1959.Saussure, Ferdinand de 1916 Cours de linguistique générale. Ed. by Charles Bally & Albert Sechehaye, with the collaboration of Albert Riedlinger. Paris and Lausanne: Payot. (2nd ed. 1922; subsequent eds essentially unchanged). Critical ed. by Rudolf Engler, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1967–74. Annotated Italian trans. by Tullio De Mauro, Bari: Laterza 1967 French ed. with De Mauro’s notes trans. by Louis-Jean Calvet, Paris: Payot 1972 English version, Course in General Linguistics, trans. by Wade Baskin, New York: Philosophical Library 1959.). Robert Godel (1902–1984) first laid out its manuscript sources, Rudolf Engler (1930–2003) produced the great critical edition, and René Amacker (1942–2024) published many of the manuscripts, including Saussure (2011)Saussure, Ferdinand de 2011 Science du langage. De la double essence du langage et autres documents du ms. BGE Arch. de Saussure 372. Édition critique partielle mais raisonnée et augmentee des “Écrits de linguistique générale”. Ed. by René Amacker. Genève: Droz.Saussure, Ferdinand de 2011 Science du langage. De la double essence du langage et autres documents du ms. BGE Arch. de Saussure 372. Édition critique partielle mais raisonnée et augmentee des “Écrits de linguistique générale”. Ed. by René Amacker. Genève: Droz.. Italian scholars have come an impressive second, starting with Tullio De Mauro’s (1932–2017) annotated Italian translation of the Cours in 1967 (with his notes translated into French in 1972, since when it has been the definitive version), and continuing with the work of De Mauro’s students, including Daniele Gambarara. The authors of the book under review are amongst Gambarara’s many students who have become prominent in the field. With the collaboration of their teacher and mentor, Cosenza and Fadda have established a centre for Saussurean studies in the Università della Calabria, where they work. It houses an impressive collection of books and documents, occupying a room appropriately named for De Mauro.

Subtitled “History of a theory of language” (this and the following are my translations), the book straddles the line between biography and textual criticism and, with one foot in each, achieves a good balance. Readers will find it both erudite and engaging, whether their interests are centred in linguistics, semiotics or neither. The structure is chronological, though not rigidly so, given the overlaps in time between numerous chapters (as noted below), where the temporal breaks align with shifts in Saussure’s thinking about language.

Chapter 1 is focussed on his years in Leipzig and the Mémoire (Saussure 1879Saussure, Ferdinand de 1879 Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes. Leipzig: printed by B. G. Teubner. Repr. in Saussure (1922: 1–268).Saussure, Ferdinand de 1879 Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes. Leipzig: printed by B. G. Teubner. Repr. in Saussure (19221: 1–268).), the radical reimagining of the Proto-Indo-European vowel system which he wrote and published there, and which established his international scholarly reputation when he was 22 years old. The Mémoire is dauntingly complex, and explaining it for a non-specialist audience is so challenging that even De Mauro barely tried. Fadda and Cosenza certainly make an effort, but not to the point of aiming to give readers a full understanding.11.No doubt readers will be able to work out the typo that has led to Saussure (1879)Saussure, Ferdinand de 1879 Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes. Leipzig: printed by B. G. Teubner. Repr. in Saussure (1922: 1–268).Saussure, Ferdinand de 1879 Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes. Leipzig: printed by B. G. Teubner. Repr. in Saussure (19221: 1–268). being referred to throughout as “Saussure (1978b)”, except in the References, where Saussure (1879)Saussure, Ferdinand de 1879 Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes. Leipzig: printed by B. G. Teubner. Repr. in Saussure (1922: 1–268).Saussure, Ferdinand de 1879 Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes. Leipzig: printed by B. G. Teubner. Repr. in Saussure (19221: 1–268). appears correctly. That would require providing and explicating many examples from many ancient languages; and the authors are relatively traditional in not really seeing the Mémoire as being of vital importance to their “history of a theory of language”. That theory is the one Saussure laid out in his three courses on general linguistics at the University of Geneva from 1907 to 1911, with particular emphasis on semiology.

Still, the Mémoire was the high point of Saussure’s publishing career. It was never forgotten by Indo-European specialists, alongside ‘Saussure’s Law’, his explanation of a stress shift in the history of the Baltic languages (Saussure 1897Saussure, Ferdinand de 1897 “Paper on Lithuanian accentuation read at the 11th International Congress of Orientalists, Geneva, 8 Sep. 1894”. Résumé in Actes du X^e Congrès International des Orientalistes [ed. by Paul Oltramare & Ferdinand de Saussure], part 1, p. 89. Repr. in Saussure (1922: 603–604).Saussure, Ferdinand de 1897 “Paper on Lithuanian accentuation read at the 11th International Congress of Orientalists, Geneva, 8 Sep. 1894”. Résumé in Actes du X^e Congrès International des Orientalistes [ed. by Paul Oltramare & Ferdinand de Saussure], part 1, p. 89. Repr. in Saussure (19221: 603–604).; see Joseph 2009Joseph, John E. 2009 “Why Lithuanian Accentuation Mattered to Saussure”. Language and History 52.182–198. Joseph, John E. 2009 “Why Lithuanian Accentuation Mattered to Saussure”. Language and History 521.182–198. , Joseph 2012Joseph, John E. 2012 Saussure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Joseph, John E. 2012 Saussure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.: 408–409, and pp. 116–120 of the volume under review). But those specialists have always been thin on the ground. Saussure’s wider fame rests entirely on the Cours.

Chapter 2 (“A rapid rise, 1879–85”) starts with his Leipzig doctorate, for which he might well have submitted the Mémoire as his thesis. He chose however to undertake an entirely new thesis on a completely different topic, the use of the genitive absolute in Sanskrit. Published as Saussure (1881)Saussure, Ferdinand de 1881 De l’emploi du génitif absolu en Sanscrit. Genève: Imprimerie Jules-Guillaume Fick. Repr. in Saussure (1922: 269–338).Saussure, Ferdinand de 1881 De l’emploi du génitif absolu en Sanscrit. Genève: Imprimerie Jules-Guillaume Fick. Repr. in Saussure (1922: 269–338)., it is far less technically turgid than the Mémoire, and Fadda & Cosenza have to put much less aside in giving their account of it. We then follow Saussure to Paris, where he went with the intention of doing a second doctorate, to gain first-rate French academic credentials alongside his first-rate German ones. He was soon recruited by Michel Bréal (1832–1915) to cover the teaching of his courses in Gothic and Old High German at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, when Bréal took on a high-level administrative role.

With no teaching experience, Saussure applied himself to the task diligently, while also pursuing a succession of research projects, including a book-length manuscript on phonology that would remain incomplete (finally published as Saussure 1995Saussure, Ferdinand de 1995 Phonétique: il manoscritto di Harvard Houghton Library bMS Fr 266 ( 8 ), ed. by Maria Pia Marchese. Padova: Unipress.Saussure, Ferdinand de 1995 Phonétique: il manoscritto di Harvard Houghton Library bMS Fr 266 (8), ed. by Maria Pia Marchese. Padova: Unipress.). The chapter ends by considering how the term ‘empirical’ had a negative sense for Saussure in these years, representing the opposite of what he took scientific work to be about. Meanwhile ‘semiological’ starts to appear in his manuscripts, and the authors see in it the first shoots of the general linguistics with which he will ultimately be associated. They liken him to one of their countryman:

Come Colombo che era partito per trovare le Indie con un altro percorso, Saussure ha trovato l’America, ma non lo sa. […] Ma, a differenza di Colombo, Saussure arriva a capire il valore di ciò che ha scoperto […].(pp. 59–60)

Like Columbus, who had set off to find an alternative route to India, Saussure has discovered America, but does not know it. […] But unlike Columbus, Saussure comes to understand the value of what he has discovered.

A nice analogy, though the famous story of Columbus and the egg shows that he realised the value of his discovery more than his contemporaries did — and it is not obvious that the same can be said of Saussure.

The dates in the title of Chapter 3 (“On the origins of general linguistics, 1885–91”) indicate a clear enough temporal break from the preceding one, and this break is applied in the coverage of the courses Saussure taught in Paris. It is less clear in the treatment of how his thought was developing, returning to 1881 to discuss notes he made on his reading of Egger (1881)Egger, Victor 1881 La parole intérieure: Essai de psychologie descriptive. Paris: Germer Baillière.Egger, Victor 1881 La parole intérieure: Essai de psychologie descriptive. Paris: Germer Baillière.. At the other end, this chapter includes a table of all the courses he taught at the University of Geneva from 1891 to 1897. None of these authorial choices poses any serious obstacle to readers’ understanding, but are mildly unsettling to readers like me who prefer their chronology neat, not on the rocks.

Since the narrative is driven by that “theory of language” in the subtitle, minimal attention is paid to the content of his Paris teaching, or indeed to the papers he gave to the Société de Linguistique de Paris and published in its Bulletin and Mémoires, or occasionally elsewhere (nearly all of them reprinted in Saussure 1922Saussure, Ferdinand de 1922 Recueil des publications scientifiques de Ferdinand de Saussure. [Ed. by Charles Bally & Léopold Gautier]. Genève: Sonor; Lausanne: Payot; Heidelberg: C. Winter.Saussure, Ferdinand de 1922 Recueil des publications scientifiques de Ferdinand de Saussure. [Ed. by Charles Bally & Léopold Gautier]. Genève: Sonor; Lausanne: Payot; Heidelberg: C. Winter.; see Gambarara 2024Gambarara, Daniele 2024 “Pour un supplément au Recueil ”. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 77.201–220. Gambarara, Daniele 2024 “Pour un supplément au Recueil”. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 771.201–220. ). Again an authorial choice that is probably in the best interest of the book’s targeted readership, and was made knowing that the odd specialist critic (that would be me again) might wince with regret at opportunities lost. Fadda & Cosenza turn to Saussure’s inaugural lectures for his Geneva chair, which he was drafting in the summer of 1891. In the manuscripts, which are described here as “tormentatissimi”, Saussure tries out new ideas and expressions, scratches them out, tries again, fails again. Sometimes, à la Samuel Beckett, he fails better, with, in our authors’ terms, “un fallimento propulsivo”, a propulsive failure.

Temporal overlaps are announced up front in the titles of the next five chapters: Chapter 4 (“Linguistics as a double science and the emergence of semiology, 1891–95”), Chapter 5 (“It is not easy to make oneself understood, 1891–97”), Chapter 6 (“A science of signs, 1897–1910”) Chapter 7 (“Pedagogy and its other: ego, names, ear, verse, 1897–1910”), Chapter 8 (“The courses in general linguistics, 1906–11”). Chapter 4 focusses on the Double essence manuscripts, which came to light in 1996 and were published in Saussure (2002)Saussure, Ferdinand de 2002 Écrits de linguistique générale. Ed. by Simon Bouquet & Rudolf Engler, assisted by Antoinette Weil. Paris: Gallimard. English version, Writings in General Linguistics, trans. by Carole Sanders & Matthew Pires, with the assistance of Peter Figueroa, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006.Saussure, Ferdinand de 2002 Écrits de linguistique générale. Ed. by Simon Bouquet & Rudolf Engler, assisted by Antoinette Weil. Paris: Gallimard. English version, Writings in General Linguistics, trans. by Carole Sanders & Matthew Pires, with the assistance of Peter Figueroa, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006., with Amacker’s critical edition following in 2011. It is here that Fadda & Cosenza anchor what for them is the essential Saussure:

[S]e la storia della teoria è più importante della teoria stessa, il Saussure “più interessante” è quello degli anni 1891–95, che rappresentano la sua principale stagione creativa, che parte con l’esigenze di un sistema di linguistica generale (e non semplicemente di un’esposizione, come erano le prolusioni — almeno all’inizio …) e che termina con la “scoperta” della semiologia, concepita come teoria delle istituzioni e dunque dei segni.(p. 84)

[I]f the history of the theory is more important than the theory itself, the “most interesting” Saussure is the one of the years 1891–95, representing his principal creative stage, which starts from the exigencies of a system of general linguistics (and not simply from an exposition, as the inaugural lectures were — at least at first …) and ends with the “discovery” of semiology, conceived as a theory of institutions and hence of signs.

This though seems like a return to the days when it was commonplace to juxtapose an ‘early’ and a ‘late’ Saussure, who had virtually no interests in common, and with the late one divided again into a Jekyll and Hyde, a theoretician of language by day who spent his nights in an obsessive search for anagrams in ancient poetry that was at odds with his own theory (see pp. 167–171 of the volume under review for a thorough refutation of this).22.The scare quotes around ‘“most interesting”’ make the authors look diffident toward their own move. Nor do I understand what they mean by “if the history of the theory is more important than the theory itself”. In the 1970s Saussure’s anagram research was actually termed ‘schizophrenic’ and ‘paranoiac’ (see Joseph 2026Joseph, John E. 2026 “Schizolinguistics, from Tuczek’s Analyse einer Katatonikersprache (1921) to Wolfson’s Le Schizo et les langues (1970)”. Language & Communication 106.13–29. Joseph, John E. 2026 “Schizolinguistics, from Tuczek’s Analyse einer Katatonikersprache (1921) to Wolfson’s Le Schizo et les langues (1970)”. Language & Communication 1061.13–29. : 22). That approach has largely given way to one which recognises that we are talking about a single man, whose thinking developed over the decades, certainly, but with more continuity than can be captured even by adding yet another Saussure to the mix.

The manuscripts from 1891 to the start of his courses in general linguistics halfway through the 1906–7 academic year are extremely well covered, and again organised in a way that strives to combine concern with the thematic and the temporal. As for the courses themselves, it is a surprise to see them compressed into a single chapter, though at 57 pages Chapter 8 is much longer than any of the others. It takes us through each of the three iterations of the course, in considerable detail, giving most attention to the theoretical-synchronic issues but not ignoring the many lessons devoted to diachrony. A still bigger surprise is the less than four pages of commentary on the published Cours, which comes in the closing Chapter 9 (“Saussure’s legacy”), in a section entitled “un vangelo canonico e apocrifo” (“a canonical and apocryphal gospel”). The rest of the chapter is a very brief sketch of later developments in structural linguistics and the more general structuralism that emerged from it.

Some readers drawn to the book by their interest in the Cours may come away thinking that the subtitle ought to have been, not “Storia”, but “Preistoria”, prehistory, of a theory of language. If Saussure was the theory’s architect, Bally and Sechehaye were the engineers who made it a reality, one which deserves better than a dismissive “apocryphal”. The authors opt for a different metaphor from my architectural one, entitling their section 4.6 “Atlante e Sisifo” (“Atlas and Sisyphus”), both referring to Saussure himself. The book’s cover flap draws on this:

L’intento è sostituire all’immagine un po’ artefatta dell’Atlante che sostiene il cosmos strutturalista (senza poi farne parte davvero) quella di un Sisifo che, pur spaventato dall’ « immensità del lavoro » (che confessa solo agli allievi più fidati), ricomincia sempre di nuovo le proprie ricerche, tracciando solchi su cui possiamo continare a camminare per riflettere sul linguaggio e le lingue.

The intent is to replace the somewhat contrived image of Atlas holding up the structuralist cosmos (without really being part of it) with that of a Sisyphus who, despite being daunted by the “immensity of the task” (which he confesses only to his most trusted students), constantly begins his own research anew, clearing paths we can continue to tread as we reflect on language and languages.

This is an astute observation, and my quibble is just that, when one wants to change how readers think, it can be more effective to complement the image that has drawn them to one’s book than to replace it. Nevertheless, those readers will not fail to appreciate what a fine, subtle study this is, founded on extraordinarily deep research and clearly written — two qualities found together all too rarely.