Ripple effects of F. Saussure

"We were born with the historical mission of national revival in this land." This is the first part of the National Education Charter that I had to memorize in elementary school. Was I really born with such a grand mission in this land? Ferdinand de Saussure is a structuralist linguist born in Switzerland. He tried to transcend the 19th century tradition of linguistics, which had remained confined to phonology or historical comparative linguistics. Saussure studied synchronic linguistics, which identified characteristics of entire systems of language at specific points in history. Before Saussure, because of the great influence of religion — namely Christianity — it was believed in the West that language and the reality it referred to had a one-to-one correspondence, word and meaning matching perfectly because it was given by an absolute God. However, Saussure asserted that components of language (signifiers) had a relationship with reality (the signified) that is arbitrary. He viewed language as a system of signs, using the words "signifier" and "signified." The signifier is the wWeiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times