'How Can he be Saussure?' - Enumerate the central ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics and evaluate its influence on twentieth Century Linguistics

How can he be Saussure? Saussure emerges so uncertainly from the second-hand sauce that we have, that it often becomes hard to say precisely what it is he intends to say. He so clearly sets himself the task of setting up a new science, and with that a radically new terminology, and yet often falls short of the level of consistency on these matters one might wish for. We do not of course have his …

…ard to credit him for, defined the terms of his new science, but it is the areas in which he could not provide a definitive answer that allowed it to develop as such. It is in the fact that people can still dispute not only what he said but also why he should have said that her achieved his ultimate ambition of putting linguistics on the footing of other modern social sciences.