summary 3 linguistic theory

FERDINANT DE SAUSSURE
The study of language in any period of history has always reflected the predominant interest of the time. At one time or another rhetoric, logic, literature, psychology, philosophy, physics, and biology has stood as goals or models for the study of language. In some instances methods of others disciplines have been adapted to linguistic purposes. During his studies Ferdinant had become dissatisfied with the idea that the sole method of studying language scientifically is from a historical point of view. But he did not see how a study that does not take the historical development of language into consideration could be made accurate until he becomes acquainted with the work of Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) in sociology. It will be helpful to examine some of Durkheim’s basic ideas and to see how they can be applied in making the study of language a “science” without requiring an appeal to history.
Durkheim’s little book Rules of the Sociological Method is still considered a classic in the field of sociology, even thought its principles and findings have been challenged. What makes the work important is that it was among the first to raise the possibility of making sociology a social science that would be distinct from anthropology and psychology. To order to outline what such a science would encompass. Durkheim’s attempted to define social facts as “things”. Comparable to the “things” studied by the physical sciences. It was this idea that Ied de Saussure to see a new way of examining language.
Durkheim defines a social fact as:
Any kind of action, whether of a set, nature or not, capable of exercising external constraint over the individual..
One of the most general criticisms of Durkheim’s position was that he ad needlessly made things out of social facts. He therefore felt obliged to defend himself against this charge of “needless reification” in the Preface to the second edition of the Rules. He claimed that the source of this critics dissatisfaction with his calling social facts “things” was their naïve understanding of what a thing is. For him a thing is different from an idea in the same way that sensation is different from intellection. A thing includes all objects of knowledge that cannot be conceived without data from experience, observation, and experiment: it is not the consequence of purely internal mental activity. Thus when Durkheim dealt with objects of knowledge as things he did not consider this view to.
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The application of these ideas to language study is obvious. Language can be considered a thing separate from our use of it as individuals, because it is inherited entire from the other speaker who teach it to us and is not our product. Language is a social fact, since it is general throughout a community and exercises a constraint on the speaker. This constraint is peculiar, since :
1. It consist in our lack of any alternatives, if we wish communicate thought it
2. It is imposed on us by education but when we master it, we are aware of no constraint.
We are not committed to saying what kind of a thing language is. We define it this way at the beginning of our study because we want to know what it is and because the formulation is presumed useful to relate it to other thing.
Although de Saussure’s fame rest principally on his work is synchronic, structural linguistics, the basic of this reputation in the learned world for a long time was based on his brilliant work in historical linguistics. He was born of a French refugee family in Switzerland, November 17, 1857 and took his elementary and secondary studies in Geneva. At the age of 18 he began his university studies in Leipzig as a student of G. Curtius. Among his fellow student were the future Junggrammatiker Leskien and Brugmann. These man were already attracting attention by the quality of their work, and in 1879, at the age of 22, de Saussure proved himself their equal in his memorable Memoire sur Ie Systeme primitive des voyeles dans les langues indo- europeennes. This work established his name immediately as one of the leading authorities of the day.
His studies completed, he went to the university of paris and took an active part in the society linguistic. From 1881 until 1889, beginning when he was 25, he lectured on comparative grammar in place of Breals. His pupil were greathly taken both by his manner and by the material he thought. After 1891 he lectured at the university of geneva. First on comparative grammar and then on general linguistics. When he died in 1913 his renowned Cours de Linguistique Generale had not yet been published. The book was assembled by some of his students by comparing their notes and some of the lecture outlines of the author.
In the Cours de Linguistique Generale we find that de Saussure had crystallized his objections to the Junggramatiker notion that restricted the scientific investigation to language to its historical aspects. In effect he proposed that an entirely different kind of study is the sole scientific approach to language. It can be said that he set himself three goals:
1. To make the synchronic study of language scientific
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2. To show that linguistic facts exist
3. To establish the method for identifying and dealing linguistic facts
Some of his main contributions to linguistic can be summarized by examining the terms he either coined or to which he gave a characteristic stamp:
1. The distinctions among la language
2. The distinction between diachronic and synchronic language study
3. His definition of the “linguistic sign”
4. The distinction between associative and syntagmatic relations in language
5. The notion of content, as opposed to linguistic significant and language
6. His description of the concrete and abstract units of language
His reason to making these distinctions was that he wanted to define language in such a way that it could be considered a thing, an object that could be studied scientifically. One of the properties he required of this object was that it be investigable without references to its historical development. He proceeded, therefore, according to the principles of Durkheim, who said that we have social facts that can be studied scientifically when we “consider them from an aspect that is independent of their individual manifestation.”
If we could subtract the individual element from le language we could eliminate the capredictable. This will give us a definition of language that fits the notion of a social fact. One definition that de Saussure gave of la language is la language minus la parole. La language is the set of passively acquired habits we have been taught by our speech community, in terms of which understand other speakers and produce combinations other speakers of our community understand. When we hear la parole of another community we perceive the noises made, but not the social fact of language. We cannot connect the sounds produced and the social facts with which the other speech community associates the sounds. When we hear la parole within our own community we perceive the sound as associated with social facts, according to a set of rules. This rules, which can be called the convention, or grammar, of the language are habits that education has imposed upon us. They have the property of being general throughout the community (that is why all the speakers can understand each other) and they exercise constraint on the individual speakers (we are not given alternative ways of linking sounds with social factors for successful communication). Mature speakers of a language of course are not aware of any constraint. Children, however, are often
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puzzled about why they must use one form instead of another.
Viewed in this way la language appears to be an abstraction. De Saussure was well aware of this, but he found it no invoconvinience for the scientific study of language. First, he held that the point of view crates the object we study. Second, no science can possibly study entities in their concrete reality, since such a study would involve an ichnite number of individual properties. In order to make many study scientific we require a conventional simplification of the data to be examined. That is, we must abstract from some of the undenied concrete properties of the things a sciences studies in order to have a precisely definable object.
For a synchronic study of language we abstract from the undeniable fact that language chances. Language can then be studied as thought it were a stable system or state, with neither a past nor a future. This view requires some justification, and he provided it by comparing the properties of la parole, as he defined it and la language.
1. Acts of speaking (la parole) are invariably individual, variable, wymsicle, and inventive. There is no principle of unity within speech considered in this way, and, therefore, it is not amenable to scientific study.
2. For a scientific study of anything we must have an object that “holds still” since we want to count and measure it; la parole consist of an infinitive number of individual choices, acts of articulation, and novel combinations. Its descriptions must therefore be infinitive.
3. La parole is not a collective instrument; all its manifestations are individual, heterogeneous, and momentary; it is only the sum of individual acts, expressible in the formula.
4. La language, however, is a collective pattern; it is something common to all the speakers, and therefore can be expressed in a different formula.
5. La language exist in the form of a sum of impressions deposited in the brain of each individual, which are almost like a dictionary of which identical copies have been constributed to each individual.
6. La language is both, a social product of the faculty of language and an esemble of the necessary convention adopted by the social body to permit the exercise of that faculty.
7. Since la language is a deposit of sign which individual has received from other speakers to the community, it is a essentially a passive thing, as opposed to la parole, which is active.
8. La language is a set of convention that we all receive, ready made, from previous speakers of the language. It would appeared that language changes so slowly that we are justified in studying it as though there were no change.
The linguistics sign
So far we have seen that for De S scientific linguistics must study the pattern that make individual utterances conform to the social restraint imposed by a speech community. We have also seen that, according to De S, diachronic linguistic, far from being the only scientific study of language, can be considered scientific only in a derivative sense, since it presupposed the finding of synchronic linguistics. It is at this point that we must examine De S definition of the concrete and integral objects of linguistic science. This object is la language, of course, but not in the all inclusive sense in which are expressions could be understood.
ASSOCIATIVE RELATIONS
Any link in the chain of speech will suggest other language units to us, because the units either resemble or differ from each other in form or meaning. De S illustrated this point by his example of the French expression enseignement, which can be equally well exemplified by its Englsih equivalent, ‘ teaching’. This word can remind us of others that have a similar form. For example, any word ending in –ing.
SYNTACMATIC RELATIONS
Syntacmatic relations, which hold between the successive members of given chain, are called relations in praesentia, since the term of the relations are actually co-occurent items.
LINGUISTIC IDENTITIES
Linguistic valued should therefore be studied from two point of view conceptual and material. For de Saussure, thought is a shapeless and indistinct mass apart from its expression in words. It is therefore impossible to discover entities, or units of thought, except through language. It is equally impossible to discover entities language by studying sounds alone.
He proceeded, therefore, according to the principles of Durkheim, who said that we have social facts that can be studied scientifically when we “consider them from an aspect that is independent of their individual manifestation
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