Ferdinand de Saussere
Founder of the school of structural linguistics. The course in general Linguistics (1916)
It was the systematic coherency and generality of language, so conceived, that inclined de Saussere to approach linguistics principally in terms of its static or synchronic dimensions, rather than its historical or diachronic dimension. For Saussere the system of language is a treasury or depository of signs and the basic unit of the linguistic sign is itself two-sided, having both a phonemic component – “the signifier” and a semantic component - “signified”.
While the relation between the signifier and signified results in what Saussere terms the positive fact of the sign, the sign ultimately derives its linguistic value from its position in the system of language as a whole, within the paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations that structurally and functionally differentiate it. Signifiers are differentially identified; signifiers are arbitrarily associated with their respectable signified concepts; and signs assume the determination they do only through their configuration within the system of language as a whole: these facts enabled Saussere to claim that language is largely to be understood as a closed formal system of differences, and that the study of language would be principally governed by its autonomous structural determinations.