Columbia School and Saussure’s langue

This paper argues that William Diver’s signal-meaning pair is Saussure’s signe linguistique in all basic respects, and that Diver’s innovation of a grammatical system is the functional equivalent of Saussure’s langue. Thus Columbia School linguistics rests squarely on a Saussurean foundation. In the course of making this case, this paper proposes a resolution of the apparent contradiction between Saussure’s definition of the linguistic sign in terms of substance – the union of concept and acoustic image – and his dictum that “la langue is a form not a substance”.