Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another.
Ferdinand de SaussureOutside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families, within which very diverse relations obtain but belonging to a single category: these are associative relations.
Ferdinand de SaussureAny psychology of sign systems will be part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively social; it will involve the same psychology as is applicable in the case of languages.
Ferdinand de SaussureNearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.
Ferdinand de Saussure