Essays on Linguistic Realism

Undoubtedly, F. de Saussure is among the founders of modern linguistics and ‘semiology’/semiotics – though, strangely enough, his success mainly resulted from a book he did not write in the strict sense. Since the publication of the Cours , edited by his disciples in 1916, his notion of ‘arbitrariness’ has become one of the main canonical catchwords of linguistics that are hardly ever called into question. After a reconstruction of the Saussurean concept of the linguistic sign and its arbit