ABSTRACT
In those days, when David Hilbert was developing an axiomatic method, Saussure had the intuition to systematize or even to ‘mathematicize’ the relational interplays, which characterize ‘la langue’ and subtend the speech: ‘The day will come, when it will be recognised that [the values and] quantities of language and their relationship are regularly expressible in their fundamental nature by mathematical forms’;2 or, again: ‘Each sort of linguistic unit represents a relation and a phenomenon is also a relation. Therefore everything is relation. The units are not phonic, they are created by the mind . . . All phenomena are relations between relations.’3
