"Benveniste's lectures had a shaping influence on a generation of scholars that includes Barthes, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Derrida, Kristeva and Todorov. Here, for the first time, these lectures are made available in English for a new generation of linguists and philosophers of language. This book includes the full course of lectures that Benveniste gave in the Collège de France on the Rue des Écoles in Paris between December 1968 and December 1969. Benveniste's work as offered here presents the first serious attempt at reconciling the sign theories of Saussure and Peirce and draws together language, writing and society into a comprehensive theory of signifying. Benveniste's philosophy of language considers key concepts such as utterance, enunciation, speaker, discourse and subjectivity and, as such, is central to the areas of discourse analysis, text linguistics, pragmatics, semantics, conversational analysis, stylistics and semiotics.