Polifonía del signo en Saussure: los Anagramas y el Curso de lingüística general

Abstract

Ferdinand de Saussure dedicated a three year period to the study of what he called «anagrams in Indoeuropean poetry». After detailed analysis of several hundred poems, he discovered that in classical Latin, Greek, Vedic and even Germanic verse, the poets had intentionally given their text a double reading: the verse sounds, in addition to being linearly employed in the service of higher, grammatical units, appeared to be invested with their own semantic task, to give emphasis to the names of the central characters featured in the plot of the poem. This paper pretends to show the relationship between the ideas presented in Saussure's Anagram Notebooks and those found in his contemporary lessons on General Linguistics, such as sign linearity and linguistic relevance of syntagmatic composition. The links demonstrate the coherence of his thought and his wide philological interests, which contradicts the generally held belief that Saussure's anagram studies represent nothing more than a diversion of no real significance, developed in intellectual isolation from his true academic pursuits.