The differences between the editions of the Saussure’s third course of lectures

Abstract

This work presents a comparative analysis between two editions raised from the courses of lectures delivered by Ferdinand de Saussure: the book “Cours de Linguistique Generale” and the book “Troisieme Cours de Linguistique Generale – d’apres les cahiers d’Emile Constantin”. This comparison was based on two critical editions of the first book, made by Rudolf Engler and Tulio de Mauro, which present the sources used at making the “Cours de Linguistique Generale”. Since the book “Troisieme Cours de Linguistique Generale – d’apres les cahiers d’Emile Constantin”.presents only the contents from the last course of lectures, it was necessary isolating from the Cours the parts referring to this same content, in order to make a comparison. Afterwards, it was possible to establish the specific features of each book, and also the points the similarities and the differences between them. The similarities found refer to the content of both books, since they were established with the subjects exposed in Saussure’s third course of lectures. The differences refer to the way the content is developed: the kind of sentences and the vocabulary used in each book. Also, it was found some differences concerned to the formal features of them, which are relate to the specific purpose of the books.