Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist and semiotician. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiology in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders of semiotics/semiology.
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.
Semiotics is the study of sign process (semiosis). It includes the study of signs and sign processes, indication, designation, likeness, analogy, allegory, metonymy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. It is not to be confused with the Saussurean tradition called semiology, which is a subset of semiotics.
The University of Tartu is a classical university in the city of Tartu, Estonia. It is the national university of Estonia. The University of Tartu is the only classical university in the country and also the biggest and most prestigious university in Estonia. It was established by King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in 1632.
In semiotics, a sign is anything that communicates a meaning that is not the sign itself to the interpreter of the sign. The meaning can be intentional such as a word uttered with a specific meaning, or unintentional, such as a symptom being a sign of a particular medical condition. Signs can communicate through any of the senses, visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or taste.
The Prague school or Prague linguistic circle was an influential group of linguists, philologists and literary critics in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis and a theory of the standard language and of language cultivation during the years 1928–1939. The linguistic circle was founded in the Café Derby in Prague, which is also where meetings took place during its first years.
Thomas Albert Sebeok was a polymath American semiotician and linguist.
Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University; his published works are in the fields of structuralism, literary theory and criticism.
Course in General Linguistics is a book compiled by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye from notes on lectures given by Ferdinand de Saussure at the University of Geneva between 1906 and 1911. It was published in 1916, after Saussure's death, and is generally regarded as the starting point of structural linguistics, an approach to linguistics that flourished in Europe and the United States in the first half of the 20th century. One of Saussure's translators, Roy Harris, summarized Saussure's contribution to linguistics and the study of language in the following way:
Language is no longer regarded as peripheral to our grasp of the world we live in, but as central to it. Words are not mere vocal labels or communicational adjuncts superimposed upon an already given order of things. They are collective products of social interaction, essential instruments through which human beings constitute and articulate their world. This typically twentieth-century view of language has profoundly influenced developments throughout the whole range of human sciences. It is particularly marked in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology".
Jan Niecisław Ignacy Baudouin de Courtenay was a Polish linguist and Slavist, best known for his theory of the phoneme and phonetic alternations.
Louis Trolle Hjelmslev was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family, Hjelmslev studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague and Paris. In 1931, he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague. Together with Hans Jørgen Uldall he developed a structural theory of language which he called glossematics, which developed the semiotic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. Glossematics as a theory of language is characterized by a high degree of formalism, it is interested only in describing the formal characteristics of language, and has a high degree of logical rigour. The theory never became widely influential, but has been adopted by post-structuralist philosophers as a possible alternative to the dominant Saussurean linguistic paradigm.
Roy Harris was a British linguist. He was Professor of General Linguistics in the University of Oxford and Honorary Fellow of St Edmund Hall. He also held university teaching posts in Hong Kong, Boston and Paris and visiting fellowships at universities in South Africa and Australia, and at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study.
Langue and parole are linguistic terms distinguished by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics. Langue encompasses the abstract, systematic rules and conventions of a signifying system; it is independent of, and pre-exists, individual users. Langue involves the principles of language, without which no meaningful utterance, "parole", would be possible. Parole refers to the concrete instances of the use of langue. This is the individual, personal phenomenon of language as a series of speech acts made by a linguistic subject. Saussure did not concern himself overly with parole; however, the structure of langue is revealed through the study of parole. The distinction is similar to that made about language by Wilhelm von Humboldt, between energeia and ergon, as well as the distinction between language and speech made by Jan Baudouin de Courtenay. Saussure drew an analogy to chess to explain the concept of langue and parole. He compared langue to the rules of chess—the norms for playing the game—and compared the moves that an individual chooses to make—the individual's preferences in playing the game—to the parole.
Sebastian Konstantinovich Shaumyan was an Armenian American theoretician of linguistics and an outspoken adherent of structuralist analysis.
Oleg Nikolayevich Trubachyov was a Russian doctor in philology. He was an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences and served as the editor-in-chief of the Etimologiya yearbook. His works are on the etymology of Slavic languages and on East Slavic onomastics.
Rasmus Viggo Brøndal was a Danish philologist and professor of Romance languages and literature at Copenhagen University.
Ludvig Puusepp, was an Estonian surgeon and researcher and the world's first professor of neurosurgery.
Ekaterina Velmezova is a Russian and Swiss philologist, professor of Slavistics and of history and epistemology of language sciences in Eastern Europe at the University of Lausanne, whose principal works concern Russian and Czech ethnolinguistics, as well as history and epistemology of language sciences in Central and Eastern Europe.
Michel Arrivé was a French novelist, short story writer, linguist and academic. He was a Professor of Linguistics and Semiotics at Paris Nanterre University from 1983 to 2006. He authored several novels and short stories.
