Biography of Saussure

Ferdinand Desaussure was  born in 1857 and died in 1913

• He studied in the shcool of neogrammarians which was focused in renovating the methods for the comparative grammar.

• In 1879 he successfully published a memoir on the primitive system of vowels in Indo-European languages​​.

• A year later he read his doctoral thesis on the use of the genitive absolute in Sanskrit (1880), from which he was appointed professor of comparative grammar at the Ecole des Hauts Etudes de Paris, and participated actively in the work of the Society linguistics.

• Although the impact of this work was not immediate, they proved decisive for the development of linguistics in the twentieth century. In their lessons should be a number of fundamental distinctions such as language (ideal system and social) andspeech (specific embodiment, individual), but especially his definition of sign as apsychic entity made ​​up of a signifier and a signified, the which would beinseparable.
  
  Indeed, the relationship of meaning to be thought from a theory of value, ie the possibility of referring to something outside of language depends on the total language system and the formal relationship of the terms together. This idea is the basis of structuralism, linguistic theory that enjoyed a boom in France during the 1950 and 1960.