Le dernier signifiant de Ferdinand de Saussure

"Double articulation" is the doctrine of linguistics which says that a language operates on two levels, essentially those of form and of meaning. It was initially formulated by Martinet (1949) within the tradition of Saussure, whose posthumous Course in General Linguistics (1916) was the starting point of modern semiology. However, in Saussure (1912), his final paper published before his death, and after the lectures from which the Course was assembled, he proposes that a set of words in the Indo-European languages which are unusual in having diphthongs where the vowel is /a/ share a common semantic feature, in expressing some infirmity or a deviation from the straight. The present paper considers what this reveals about his intellectual direction of travel just before his death, and how it coincides with innovations introduced by his associates Meillet and Bally, who were exploring the 'affective' elements of language. Saussure's proposal is also compared with the later ideas of Martinet, Firth, Whorf and Lacan.