Geneva School, after Saussure

Abstract

This chapter explains working and features of Geneva School of Linguistics. The “Geneva School of Linguistics,” a term first used in print by Charles Bally in 1908, may be said to comprise a fairly large number of linguists including—besides Ferdinand de Saussure—all his direct and indirect disciples in Geneva. The term “stylistics” is not well-chosen and has given rise to numerous misunderstandings. It is apparent in the chapter that the “Geneva School” has no particular unity of doctrine. However, it is possible in retrospect to discover a denominator common to the various representatives of the School: they all share the conviction, inherited from Saussure, that the sign theory is the heart of linguistics. This leads to what might be called, from the epistemological viewpoint, a “semiological linguistics.” The second common point is that, for the majority of the Genevan linguists, language is a basically socio-historical phenomenon that is to say neither purely biological, nor purely conventional.