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Robert (Bobbie) Robins was a pioneer in the establishment of linguistics as an academic subject in Britain and the leading scholar throughout the world in the history of linguistics whose undergraduate career was interrupted by service in the RAF, in which he was required to learn Japanese and then teach it to service personnel. He joined the new Department of Phonetics and Linguistics at SOAS, University of London, in 1948 and became a professor in 1966. Robins published General Linguistics: an introductory survey in 1964 (4th edition 1989). His textbook, A Short History of Linguistics (1967), was the most comprehensive published, and he was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1986. After his death, the Philological Society established an annual Robins Prize and the University of Luton has the R. H. Robins Memorial Prize for linguistics. Obituary by F. R. Palmer FBA and Vivien Law FBA.

This chapter examines the interpretation of Ferdinand de Saussure's ideas by the editors of the Course in General Linguistics, explaining that it was Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye themselves who were the first to raise doubts about their own interpretation of Saussure's linguistic theorising. As colleagues and close friends of Saussure, Bally and Sechehaye were in the best possible position to understand his views on language. However, they were not able to attend the courses of general linguistics given by Saussure and were also confused by what they discovered from the notes of students who attended his lectures. Two gaps in their interpretation that particularly concerned Bally and Sechehaye were the absence of any detailed treatment of semantics and the absence of a linguistique de la parole.

This chapter discusses Leonard Bloomfield's view on Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic ideas. Bloomfield, one of the most influential figures in American linguistics in the first half of the twentieth century, believed that Saussure's Course in General Linguistics provided us with the theoretical basis for a science of human speech, but found no originality in his thinking. Bloomfield argued that Saussure's contribution lay in his systematisation of ideas, which had previously been ‘here and there fragmentarily expressed’.

This chapter examines Roman Jakobson's interpretation of Ferdinand de Saussure's ideas about linguistics, explaining that Jakobson's approach to Saussure was nothing if not eclectic. He picked out the bits of Saussure's teachings that he liked and rejected or dismissed the rest. Jakobson liked Saussure's distinction between syntagmatic and associative relations but criticised Saussure's failure to appreciate the role of distinctive features. He also argued that Saussure's Course in General Linguistics contained errors, frequent contradictions and dangerous simplification.

This chapter examines Saussure's conceptions of signs and language. Signs are the fundamental units of language, its inalienable property. Saussure realized that for the sign as a linguistic phenomenon, its substantial physical shape and content are irrelevant. Speakers accept the signs of their language as they are, without asking for any logical or empirical justification of their dual configurations. Saussure's principle of arbitrariness reveals itself as the principle of freedom—a linguistic manifestation of the metaphysical principle of free will that people exercise in their capacity as speakers. The fundamental freedom of language, grounded in arbitrariness, shows itself in the unlimited diversity of forms different languages. No logical or empirical restrictions exist that could determine the playground of values that is language or set limits to its transformations. For Saussure, the structural diversity of languages is more than an empirically known fact—it is, rather, “primordial reality,” reflecting the very essence of language.