The ACRPS has published Questions in Linguistics and Semiotics: A Reading of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Texts by Mokhtar Zouaoui (239 pp.). The book is a study of five new texts by Ferdinand de Saussure which were discovered in 1996 and published in 2002, and it is composed of two sections. The first section addresses many issues related to epistemologies of linguistics and de Saussure’s intellectual system, such as the question of arranging his linguistic ideas within a system, his disposition, his conceptions in the philosophy of linguistics, the metaphysics of signs, abstraction, dichotomies, and the principle of opposition. In the second section, Zouaoui devotes a chapter to each of the five sets of texts to present its contents and the issues de Saussure examined. These are: issues on the question of beginnings; the critique of comparative grammar and the comparative method; methodology and descriptive language; semiology and the geographic distribution of tongues; and discourse.

In understanding de Saussure’s linguistic thought, the concept of the system is often related to language. Today, there is little disagreement on the point that languages are all systems of signs. Yet the book discusses this concept not only because it is foundational to the nature of language but also because it is essential to Saussurian linguistic thought. For ages, philosophers have often discussed the concept of the system and even used it as a title for their works or parts thereof, as for instance with Carl Linnaeus, Étienne de Condillac, and so on. André Lalande even came to associate it with two meanings, the first relating to the nature of a group of elements or things, writing that “the system is a group of components, whether material or not, each of which relates to the other.” He gives the examples of the solar system, the nervous system, and a system of three equations; it is in this sense that modern Arab scholars use the term niẓām for the solar system (al-niẓām al-shamsī), the term jihāz for the nervous system (al-jihāz al-ʿaṣabī), and the term nasaq for a system of equations (nasaq min thalāth muʿādalāt).

Lalande’s second meaning relates to the nature of ideas, on which he wrote that the term system refers specifically to “a set of scientific of philosophical ideas that are logically interrelated, not in terms of their truth but in terms of the similarity between them”. He draws this meaning from a definition of the concept of the system offered by Condillac: “the system is merely the order of the various parts of a given art or science according to a structure by which each part relies on the others; thus, the last one explains the first”.

Although modern researchers have continued to differentiate between the two meanings by translating the word “système” at times as niẓām and at others as nasaq, based on the notion that the former relates to the world of things and the latter to the world of ideas, Zouaoui argues that the concept of the system (nasaq) must not be understood as the foundation for the nature of the order of things in themselves; rather, these are our conceptions or representations of this order. It is true that the instruments and mechanisms that humans have created have brought us closer than before to grasping the nature of things and the forms of their arrangement, but these conceptions are in fact no more than a representation of reality; thus, they belong to the world of ideas in the same way as the philosophical or scientific ideas evoked by the second meaning of the term system.

Since the end of the previous century, de Saussure’s epistemology has been the subject of research and investigation for modern scholars. Despite the difference in their interpretations, they agree on setting de Saussure’s Lectures in General Linguistics aside in favour of his texts that were published in 2002 and his manuscripts still held at the Geneva and Harvard libraries, extracting those which appear worthy of being categorised within the sphere of epistemologies. Although these writings do not contain the term “epistemology”, de Saussure’s reflections and thoughts in these texts on his methodology and the subject of the science he inaugurated, or those in which he set forth his critiques of comparative grammar, are all ideas that ought to be characterised as epistemological: they are ideas on the philosophy of science and knowledge.

On the subject of language and society, de Saussure’s manuscript The Double Essence of Language contains an original conception that makes no distinction between language and speech. He reveals a semiotic conception unparalleled in the book Lectures in General Linguistics that comes in the form of the following equation: “semiology = morphology, grammar, synthesis, synonymity, rhetoric, stylistics, lexicography, etc… everything is related”. This equation underpins an indivisible unity in the framework of linguistic semiology between the familiar branches of linguistics such as morphology, lexicology, synthetics, and semantics. These are sciences concerned with studying languages and others related to studying speech, such as rhetoric, stylistics, and so forth. This conception is highly compatible with de Saussure’s conception of linguistics whereby there can be no separation between the linguistics of language and the linguistics of speech, contrary to what is advanced in Lectures on General Linguistics.