Saussure introduced Structuralism in Linguistics. It marked a revolutionary break in the study of language, which had till then been historical and philological. In his Course in General Linguistics (1916), Saussure described language as a system of signs constructed by convention. Understanding meaning to be relational, being produced by the interaction between various signifiers and signifieds, he held that meaning cannot be understood in isolation. Saussure illustrated this relationality of language, with the terms paradigmatic axis (of selection) and the syntagmatic axis (of combination). Further, he challenged the view of reality as independent and existing outside language and reduced tang cage to a mere “naming system”. He questioned the conventional “correspondence theory of meaning” and argued that meaning is arbitrary, and that language does not merely reflect the world, but constitutes it.
Dr Khurram Shahzad
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