Ferdinand de Saussure's research while affiliated with Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and other places

... A philosopher, Heidegger 14) , stated that "language is the house of being". The fundamental function of language is to articulate the world, and the world was not clearly articulated before the introduction of language 15) . More specifically, before the world was articulated by language, it was a continuum 16) , and there were no such things or ideas that we are seeing now, including the existence of the self. ...

... A fundamental assumption in structuralist linguistics is the distinction between signifier and signified as introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure (Saussure, 2001) in the early 20 th century. Computational linguistic approaches, when using character strings as the only representatives for word meaning, implicitly assume identity between signifier and signified. ...

... Major exponents of 20th century linguistics had construed the building blocks of speech as purely symbolic units without any motor or acoustic substance. It was one of the major achievements of structuralist phonology that it divested the speech sounds from their " flesh and blood " (Jakobson, 1937, Lecture 1) and transformed them into purely contrastive, " immaterial " units, which are " keineswegs lautlich [not sound-like in any way] " (De Saussure, 1967, p. 142). Later, generative phonology conceived phonological representations of words as " feature matrices of an abstract sort, " figuring solely as the arguments of a set of algebraic rules (Chomsky & Halle, 1991, p. 9) Likewise, in some of the more recent computational models of word production, the phonological forms of words were construed as linear strings of abstract segments, generated through activation flows in a network of equally abstract syllabic and subsyllabic nodes, without any acoustic or motor constraints influencing the functioning of this machinery (e.g., Dell, Schwartz, Martin, Saffran, & Gagnon, 1997). ...

... The relationship between language, the things it describes, and human thought have been heavily studied, widely debated, and described by many authors in the form of a triangle (Almeida, Souza & Fonseca, 2011;Dahlberg, 1978;Kuhn, 2009;Nirenburg & Raskin, 2001;Peirce, 1965;Ranganathan, 1937;Saussure, 1967;Steinbring, 1998;Tichy, 1988). We adopt and extend Ogden and Richards (1923) version of the triangle, as shown in Figure 1, as a framework for our review of research into spatial language. ...

... First, the field of study focusing on the sign itself includes the exploration of the kinds of signs, the ways in which they convey meaning, and the way they are associated with the people who use the signs. Because signs are human systems wherein signs are organized (Saussure, 1959). These studies focus on codes developed to meet the needs of society or culture and the search for ways to operate existing communication channels for the transmission of these codes. ...

... Saussure, one of the most influential modern linguists, stated that the link between a linguistic sign and its referent is arbitrary (Saussure, Riedlinger, Bally, & Sechehaye, 1916/1966. That is why different languages have different words for the same concept. ...

... No fue hasta 1917 que los estudiantes de Ferdinand de Saussure compilaran y publicaran la obra Curso de Lingüística General (Saussure, 1945) que la visión del estudio del lenguaje cambió. La influencia de Saussure (1945) ha sido tal que se le considera el padre de la lingüística moderna. ...

... In that, language alone "provide[s] a fulcrum that satisfies the mind" (Saussure, 1959, p. 9). Saussure claims that 'language is arbitrary' which refers to nothing outside the mind but to concepts in our minds (Saussure, 1959). This shift makes Saussure 'rationalist' or in his new terminology 'signified'. ...

... En efecto, sería más fácil escudarse en el hecho más general, constatado por Saussure (1973Saussure ( , 2004, de que, contrariamente al caso de otras disciplinas, en la lingüística el objeto de estudio no está dado de una manera inequívoca. En una nota para su proyectado libro De la doble esencia del lenguaje, ya se pregunta Saussure: ¿Hay un objeto primero e inmediato, un objeto dado ante el que se encuentra la lingüística, un conjunto de cosas que aparecen ante los sentidos, como en el caso de la física, la química, la botánica, la astronomía, etcétera? ...