Amazon.com description: Product Description: Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale has been one of the seminal books of the twentieth century, having shaped modern linguistics and semiology, and having importantly affected anthropology, philosophy and literary studies. Yet the book was written by Saussure's colleagues, based on student notes taken during the three occasions when Sausssure gave his lectures on general linguistics. Until now, those notes themselves have been unavailable, except in fragmented and incomplete form in Engler's unwieldy and hard-to-find edition of the Cours. This volume presents Riedlinger's notes on the second course of lectures in the sequence in which they were written. The notes are accompanied by an introduction and a full English translation of the text. This edition also contains an appendix with the notes of Charles Patois. Patois' notes have never before been published, and make this book unique.

Together with the notes to the first and third volumes, this work provides the most reliable source material for Saussure's thought. It will be welcomed by linguistic theorists, historians of linguistics, philosophers, and students.