Saussure: Language as a Social Fact.

Hi Everyone!
Well, this time we are going to present you a fun activity… The Word Puzzle! :)
This activity is based on the page 18 to 29, and the topic is “Saussure: language as a social fact”.
The activity will help you to make a review of the entire unit and the most important aspects of it.


Now we will present you the sentences that you are going to complete with the words that you will search in the Word Puzzle, later.

1. By the end of the ____________ century, the equation of languages with biological species had largely been abandoned. This created a difficulty for the notion of linguistics as an academic discipline.

2. Although it was not typically felt to be problematic by linguists of the nineteenth century, the question ‘How does it make sense to postulate entities called ‘_____________’ or “dialects” underlying the tangible reality of particular utterances?’ in fact remained open during that period.

3. Mongin ___________ de Saussure, born in Geneva in 1857.

4. Saussure defined the notion of ‘___________ linguistics’ – the study of languages as systems existing at a given point in the time.

5. Ferdinand de Saussure ________ in 1913.

6. Two of his colleagues, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye decided to reconstruct lecture-notes that Saussure had left behind: the book they produced, the Cours de linguistique générale.

7. According to Saussure there is an essentially ____________ character to the synchronic facts of a language which he claims to be lacking in diachrony.

8. Saussure’s concept of an état de langue as a network of relationships in which the value of each element ultimately depends, directly or indirectly, on the value of every other.

9. A language comprises a set of ‘signs’ each sign being the union of a ____________ with a signifié.

10. According to Saussure, the _________ which actually occur in the history of a language are in no way dependent on the effect they will have on the system.

11. A language, according to Saussure, is an example of the kind of entity which certain sociologists call ‘social _________’.