6533b82efe1ef96bd1292e0a

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Saussure et les Grecs

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Saussure was an innovator of the meta-linguistic terminology, too. In addition to his theoretical analysis he tried to find the more adequate terms to explain how the language works. The Greek philosophers were the main source of this theoretical and terminological research. The essay compares concepts and terms of the Saussurian linguistic with concepts and terms of Greek philosophy. "Signifiant" and "signifié", for example, which belong to the common sense of modern linguist, are a Saussurian innovation modeled on the stoic couple "semainon/semainòmenon". But this is not a loan translation. He focuses on the arbitrary nature of their relation through the Aristotle’s and early Stoicism’s analyses on the notion of "pros ti". Thanks to this comparison the essay detects the presence of an hidden phoneme in the Aristotelian-Saussurian phonological system: the linguistic pause.