Dr.Jodi Tommerdahl

I moved to Paris for the first time in the summer of 1991 and met a young British man who was about to enter Oxford University in the fall.  He was spending the summer in Paris working, perfecting his French, and going through his reading list for his first term at Oxford.  One of the books on his list that he suggested was Course in General Linguistics by Saussure.  Saussure revolutionized linguistics by making distinctions such as the difference between the signifier, meaning the sound of a word, and the signified, the idea the sound conjures in a mind.  Saussure is known as a founder of structuralism and laid the path to making linguistics into the scientific study of language.  It inspired me to the point that the rest of my studies in Trondheim, London and Paris focused on linguistics and provided me with a strong structuralist perspective from which to view the world.