"[10] Although they have undergone extension and critique over time, the dimensions of organization introduced by Saussure continue to inform contemporary approaches to the phenomenon of language.

"[16] He spent the year studying Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit and taking a variety of courses at the University of Geneva.

[17] Two years later, at 21, Saussure published a book entitled Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (Dissertation on the Primitive Vowel System in Indo-European Languages).

[20] Saussure, who had studied some basic grammar of Lithuanian in Leipzig for one semester but was unable to speak the language, was thus dependent on Kurschat.

Saussure taught at the École pratique des hautes études for eleven years during which he was named Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor).

His son Raymond de Saussure was a psychiatrist and prolific psychoanalytic theorist, who was trained under Sigmund Freud himself.

His lectures about important principles of language description in Geneva between 1907 and 1911 were collected and published by his pupils posthumously in the famous Cours de linguistique générale in 1916.

Today it is clear that Cours owes much to its so-called editors Charles Bally and Albert Sèchehaye and various details are difficult to track to Saussure himself or his manuscripts.

[27] Saussure's theoretical reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European language vocalic system and particularly his theory of laryngeals, otherwise unattested at the time, bore fruit and found confirmation after the decipherment of Hittite in the work of later generations of linguists such as Émile Benveniste and Walter Couvreur, who both drew direct inspiration from their reading of the 1878 Mémoire.

Most notably, Nikolay Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson headed the efforts of the Prague School in setting the course of phonological theory in the decades from 1940.

Jakobson's universalizing structural-functional theory of phonology, based on a markedness hierarchy of distinctive features, was the first successful solution of a plane of linguistic analysis according to the Saussurean hypotheses.

[citation needed] In America, where the term 'structuralism' became highly ambiguous, Saussure's ideas informed the distributionalism of Leonard Bloomfield, but his influence remained limited.

[31][32] Systemic functional linguistics is a theory considered to be based firmly on the Saussurean principles of the sign, albeit with some modifications.

This has the effect of highlighting what is, in fact, the one point of arbitrariness in the system, namely the phonological shape of words, and hence allows the non-arbitrariness of the rest to emerge with greater clarity.

An example of something that is distinctly non-arbitrary is the way different kinds of meaning in language are expressed by different kinds of grammatical structure, as appears when linguistic structure is interpreted in functional terms[33]Saussure's most influential work, Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique générale), was published posthumously in 1916 by former students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, based on notes taken from Saussure's lectures in Geneva.

Its central notion is that language may be analyzed as a formal system of differential elements, apart from the messy dialectics of real-time production and comprehension.

[36] While a student, Saussure published an important work about Proto-Indo-European, which explained unusual forms of word roots in terms of lost phonemes he called sonant coefficients.

It has been argued[citation needed] that Saussure's work on this problem, systematizing the irregular word forms by hypothesizing then-unknown phonemes, stimulated his development of structuralism.

[39] The question of whether words are natural or arbitrary (and artificially made by people) returned as a controversial topic during the Age of Enlightenment when the medieval scholastic dogma, that languages were created by God, became opposed by the advocates of humanistic philosophy.

Cognitive semantics also diverges from Saussure on this point, emphasizing the importance of similarity in defining categories in the mind as well as opposition.

[45] In his treatment of language as a 'social fact', Saussure touches on topics that were controversial in his time, and that would continue to split opinions in the post-war structuralist movement.

Instead of discarding August Schleicher's organicism or Heymann Steinthal's "spirit of the nation", he restricted their sphere in ways that were meant to preclude any chauvinistic interpretations.

[f] This idea is in principle borrowed from Steinthal, so Saussure's concept of a language as a social fact corresponds to "Volksgeist", although he was careful to preclude any nationalistic interpretations.

[52] Saussure's influence was restricted to American linguistics which was dominated by the advocates of Wilhelm Wundt's psychological approach to language, especially Leonard Bloomfield (1887–1949).

[53] The Bloomfieldian school rejected Saussure's and other structuralists' sociological or even anti-psychological (e.g. Louis Hjelmslev, Lucien Tesnière) approaches to the theory of language.

[57] Advocates of the new school, generative grammar, claim that Saussure's structuralism has been reformed and replaced by Chomsky's modern approach to linguistics.

He points out that Chomsky's criticism of 'structuralism' is directed at the Bloomfieldian school and not the proper address of the term; and that structural linguistics is not to be reduced to mere sentence analysis.

Saussure's ideas replaced social Darwinism in Europe as it was banished from humanities at the end of World War II.

[61] The publication of Richard Dawkins's memetics in 1976 brought the Darwinian idea of linguistic units as cultural replicators back to vogue.

This led to a redefinition of old humanistic terms such as structuralism, formalism, functionalism, and constructionism along Darwinian lines through debates that were marked by an acrimonious tone.