ABSTRACT
We can begin with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist whose work forms the groundbase on which most contemporary structuralist thinking now rests. Saussure inherited the traditional view already referred to, that the world consists of independently existing objects, capable of precise objective observation and classification. In respect of linguistics this outlook yields a notion of language as an aggregate of separate units, called ‘words’, each of which somehow has a separate ‘meaning’ attached to it, the whole existing within a diachronic or historical dimension which makes it subject to observable and recordable laws of change.
