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Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.

Ferdinand de Saussure

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Ferdinand de Saussure
Age: 55 †
Born: 1857
Born: November 26
Died: 1913
Died: February 22
Linguist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Phonologist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Genève
Saussure
Thought
Indistinct
Shapeless
Psychologically
Apart
Mass
Expression
Words

More quotes by Ferdinand de Saussure

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Written forms obscure our view of language. They are not so much a garment as a disguise.
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Within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage: these are syntagmatic relations, of which I have spoken.
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It is only since linguistics has become more aware of its object of study, i.e. perceives the whole extent of it, that it is evident that this science can make a contribution to a range of studies that will be of interest to almost anyone.
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The business, task or object of the scientific study of languages will if possible be 1) to trace the history of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a very limited extent and for very few languages.
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It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies upon psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent.
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A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.
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Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families, within which very diverse relations obtain but belonging to a single category: these are associative relations.
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Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.
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Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.
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Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another.
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Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.
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It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.
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The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.
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