Where structuralism comes from

John Sturrock

• Course in General Linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure, translated by Roy Harris
  Duckworth, 236 pp, £24.00, March 1983, ISBN 0 7156 1738 9
• Semiotic Perspectives by Sandor Hervey
  Allen and Unwin, 273 pp, £15.00, September 1982, ISBN 0 00 440026 7

With Chomsky seemingly off the stage – exit left, the script reads, brooding on the sins of American foreign policy – it is now or never for Ferdinand de Saussure to take his place. One theorist of language at a time is probably all the popular awareness has room for, and over the past twenty years Chomsky has been it, investing grammar with a new, deep-seated charm, and bringing us to see language as a mysterious acquisition which does our species, and our brains, much credit. But as a linguist at least Chomsky has gone quiet, and even before that so much of his work had turned into a kind of algebra it could no longer make sense to the world at large. This is a fine moment, therefore, to exchange Chomsky for a theorist who saw language whole and in terms accessible to all: for Saussure, dead these seventy years, yet still, how wrongly, under a cloud in the English-speaking world.