ABSTRACT
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose posthumously published Course in General Linguistics became a catalyst for the development of structuralism. He was born in Geneva, Switzerland, into a family with a lineage of noted academics dating back to the eighteenth century. Saussure himself displayed a gift for languages from an early age. Saussure called his new linguistic science semiology, a term derived from the Greek word for “sign”. The consequences of Saussure’s insights are fundamental to twentieth-century thought, in part because semiotics is an interdisciplinary venture. By asserting the “arbitrariness of the sign,” Saussure’s work draws attention to the problematic of intent in any spoken or written text. Within art history, Saussure’s work has had a somewhat problematic reception, but its influence has nonetheless been remarkable. Saussure’s semiotics enters art historical discourse as soon as he calls the signifier an acoustic image.
