语言学教程最经典笔记.docVIP

Week 1.The Nature of Human Lang Ferdinand de Saussure (1857,11 – 1913,2 ), a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century and widely considered to be one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics, said in 1916: “Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable to a system of writing…” Edward Sapir (1884, 1-1939, 2), a German-born American anthropologist- linguist, said in 1921: “Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emo