Saussure and Chomsky´s Song

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A Brief History About language as Social Fact.

SAUSSURE: LANGUAGE AS SOCIAL FACT

Although nowdays one thinks of Saussure first and foremost as the scholar who defined the notion of ‘synchronic linguistics’ –the study of languages as the system existing at a given point of time, as opposed to the historical linguistics (‘diachronic’ linguistics, as Saussure called it to clarify the contrast) which had seemed to his contemporaries the only possible approach to the subject- in his own lifetime this was far from his main claim to fame.

Saussure was trained as a linguist of the conventional, historical variety, and became outstandingly successful as such at a very early age: his Mémoire sur le systeme primitive des voyelles aans les langues indo-européennes (1878), published a few weeks after his 21^st birthday while he was a student in Germany, remains one of the landmarks in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European.

Two of his colleagues, however, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, who had been prevented by their own teaching duties for hearing Saussure’s lectures on general linguistics, decided to reconstruct them from notes taken by students together with such lecture-notes as Saussure had left had left behind: the book they produced, the Cours de linguistique générale, was the vehicle by which Saussure’s thought became known to the scholarly world, and it is in virtue of this one document that Saussure is recognized as the father of 20^th century linguistics.

Consider, for instance, the fairly standard controversy in the description of English as to wheter the affricate spelled ch should be analysed as a unit or as a combination of /t/ followed by /∫/. There are arguments on both sides: the second solution is in a sense more plausible, since it suggests that an Englishman has fewer different sounds to learn, but on the other hand it implies a consonant cluster quiet different in kind from the other clusters found in English (e.g. we have no / K∫ /, / P∫ / ). What cannot be relevant, if phonological analysis is supposed to represent some truth about English as a vehicle of communication between contemporary English-speakers, is the fact that, historically, ch descends from a single sound, / k /, and never had anything to do with / t / + /∫/.

In an analogy that keeps recurring throughout the Cours, Saussure compares a language with a game of chess: what has gone before is quite irrelevant to the current state of play at any point.

According to Saussure there is an essentially systematic character to the synchronic facts of language which he claims to be lacking in diachrony.

A language comprises a set of ‘’signs’’ (represented by the divisions marked off by dotted lines), each sign being the union of a signifiant (a ‘’signifier’’, or portion of speech-sound) with a signifié (a ‘signified’, or portion of meaning); but individual signs cannot be considered in isolation, since both their pronunciation and their meaning are defined by their contrasts with the other signs of the system –without the system provided by a given language, we have no basis for individuating sounds or concepts.

Why does Saussure say that diachronic linguistics lacks this ‘systematic’ character? In the first place, he is making a simple factual comment on the descriptive technique of historical linguistics as he knew it. A typical historical statement would be. Say, that the sound [ a ] changed to [ e ] in such-and-such a language at some particular period; and a historical linguist would not, typically, have laid much stress on the question whether or not the language already had an [ e ] sound before the change occurred. But for Saussure this question is all-important. If there was no [ e ] previously, then all that has happened is that one of the phonemes of the language has modified its pronunciation, and from Saussure’s point of view this hardly counts as a change at all.

A state of play in chess is not affected in the slightest if we substitute a knight made of ivory for a wooden knight: similarly, in language, what matters is the form of the system not the substance (in this case, speech-sound) by which the elements of that system are realized. (After all, English is still English whether we realize it as spoken sounds or as ink on paper.) If, on the other hand, the language already had an [ e ] identical to the new form [ e ] from [ a ], then a change in the system has taken place. Two phonemes have merged into one; pairs of words that previously contrasted in pronunciation have become homophones, and this change in one part of the system will have repercussions throughout the system as a whole.

Saussure felt that historical sound-changes are in a sense intrinsically independent of systems.

According to Saussure, the changes which actually occur in the story of a language are in no way dependent on the effect they will have on the system: the dropping of final / s z / is no less (and no more) likely in English than the dropping of final / f v /.

A language, according to Saussure, is an example of the kind of entity which certain sociologists call ‘social facts’.

Durkheim propounded the notion of ‘social fact’ in his Rules of Sociological Method. According to Durkheim, the talk of sociology was to study and describe a realm of phenomena quite distinct in kind both from the phenomena of the physical world and from the phenomena dealt with by psychology, although just as real as these other categories of phenomena.

This give Saussure the answer to the ontological problem posed above. ‘French’ is not a thing in the same sense as a chair or a table; but, if there is a category of ‘things’ which includes legal systems and structures of convention, then languages surely fit squarely into that category too. The data which a linguist can actually observe are of course perfectly physical phenomena –sequences of vocal sounds, printed texts and the like. But we must draw a distinction between the physical facts which can be tangibly observed –what Saussure call parole, ‘speaking’ –and the general system of langue, ‘language’, which those physical phenomena exemplify but which is not itself a physical phenomenon. The concrete data of parole are produced by individual speakers, but ‘language’ is not complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only within a colectivity’.

FUNCTIONS OF LANGUAGE

Mind Map

Timeline

Historical linguistcs

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vocabulary

Linguistics: Linguistics is the scientific study of human language.



Sociolinguistics: Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society.



competence, being an ideal, is located as a psychological or mental property or function.



Performance, which refers to an actual event.



Phonetics: is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or languages, the equivalent aspects of sign.



phonology: is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with "the sounds of language is.


The first is the study of language structure, or grammar.



This focuses on the system of rules followed by the speakers (or hearers) of a language. It encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words),


syntax (the formation and composition of phrases and sentences from these words),

.

The study of language meaning is concerned with how languages employ logical structures and real-world references to convey, process, and assign meaning, as well as to manage and resolve ambiguity.



This subfield encompasses semantics (how meaning is inferred from words and concepts) and pragmatics (how meaning is inferred from context).



Language in its broader context includes evolutionary linguistics, which considers the origins of language.


historical linguistics: which explores language change.


psycholinguistics: which explores the representation and function of language in the mind.


neurolinguistics: which looks at language processing in the brain.


language acquisition: how children or adults acquire language.


discourse analysis: which involves the structure of texts and conversations.


Semiotics: is the general study of signs and symbols both within language and without.


Literary theorists: study the use of language in literature.



Linguistics additionally draws on and informs work from such diverse fields as psychology, speech-language pathology, informatics, computer science, philosophy, biology, human anatomy, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology.