Assignment
- Identify writers you wish to research
- Identify their key ideas in relation to critical theory
- Determine if their ideas have been influential on the new media today
For this Assignment, Adnan and myself teamed up and decided to write about one writer each, Adnan chose Chomsky and I chose Saussure. So for my half of the assignment i am studying Ferdinand de Saussure; a Swiss Linguist, Writer and Theorist, also considered; the father semiotics.
Saussures most famous development was his concept of the linguistic sign/signifier model which is the basis of semiotics. Saussure is also credited with moving language away from 19th century structure and towards modern linguistics, it can be argued that he laid the foundations of modern linguistics.
Saussures in depth study of signs led him to question why we named or perceived things the way we did. for example he questioned why we called dogs, dogs.when there is no sound or syllable in the word that relates to or indicates the features or description of a dog. Saussre studied the seemingly arbitrary reasons behind why we named things the way we did.
His most influential work was published 3 years after his death; Course in general Linguistics discussed all of Saussures findings, how he interpreted the cultural reasons behind semiotics, and behind the structure of language itself.
Though Saussure’s work with linguistics was considered an excellent resource up to the 1950′s in recent times it has become regarded as outdated in modern linguistics, one could argue that modern linguistics has been built on the foundations of Saussure’s work however. Saussure’s work with semiotics is still used today when describing the breakdown of signage, so in my view its still just as relevant now as it was then.
