Ferdinand de Saussure, "Course in General Linguistics"

Does not the grammatical organism depend constantly on the external forces of linguistic change? Whatever the merits of understanding the external environment, to say language cannot be studied from the inside is wrong. Changes in languages can be stuided simply by looking at the relation of one word with the other words inside a system. External linguistics adds detail to detail without being caught in the vice of a system. In internal linguistics, the picture differs dramatically as language is understood as a system that has its own arrangements, like a chess game where the number of pieces rather than what the pieces are made of is what is relevant.

SUBJECT MATTER AND SCOPE OF LINGUISTICS; ITS RELATIONS WITH OTHER SCIENCES:

Linguistics compromises all manifestations of human speech regardless of time or place. Linguistics seek to describe and trace the history of all observable languages which amounts to tracing the history of families of languages and reconstructing as far as possible the mother tongue of each. It should also try to understand universal and permanent forces at work in all languages and deduce general laws to which all historic phenomena can be reduced.

As opposed to history, language is merely a document. Anthropology only studies man as a species: language is a social fact.

Other sciences work with objects given in advance and that can be considered from different viewpoints, but linguistics differs in it is the viewpoint that creates the object, that the way the question is considered alters the outcome of any inquiry. Language is not to be confused with human speech, although the latter is a definite part of the former. Language is a self-contained whole and a principle of classification. It is also a convention and the nature of the sign that is agreed upon does not matter. Language gives a unity to the study of social phenomena that others fail.

Among individuals linked together by speech, some sort of average will be set up where all will reproduce the same signs united with the same concepts. How does this come about? In separating language from speaking we are at the same time separating what is social from what is individual and what is essential from what is accessory and more or less accidental. Language is not a function of the speaker; it is a product that is passively assimilated by the individual and never requires premeditation, and reflection enters only for the purpose of classification.

An individual act is willful and intellectual and distinguishing between combinations by which a speaker uses language to express thought and the psychological mechanism permitting him exteriorize those combinations.

Language is a well-defined object in the heterogeneous mass of speech facts. It can be localized in the limited segment of the speaking-circuit where an auditory image is associated with a concept. The social side of speech, outside the individual who can never create or modify it himself, exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community; an individual only acquires it through sustained assimilation. Language is a system of signs in which the only essential thing is the union of meanings and sound-images and the associations which bear the stamp of collective approval are realities that have their seat in the brain.

Language is a unique social institution. As a system of signs that expresses ideas, it is the most important of all others. A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable as a part of social psychology and of general psychology. Semiology, the study of signs, illuminates what constitutes signs, what laws govern them.

IMMUTABILITY AND MUTABILITY OF THE SIGN:

No human agency in the production of a sign and what it represents. Language provides the best sign that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated rather than a rule to which all freely consent. No society knows any language other than that which was passed down to it by its ancestors. Nothing is explained by saying that language is something inherited and leaving it at that. Can not existing and inherited laws be modified from one moment to the next? The bigger question is how are other social institutions transmitted? We must first determine the greater or lesser amounts of freedom that the other institutions enjoy and then to discover why, in a given category, the forces of tradition carry more weight than those of free action. And why does history dominate the transmission of language?

Succeeding generations are fused with their ancestors. Speakers are also unconscious of the laws of language, and being unconscious, cannot exert agency to alter them, if they even wanted to them.

The arbitrary nature of a sign protects it from interference as people would find no point in arguing over which word works best for a concept. The sheer volume of signs in any language system also renders it immune to rapid change. A system can be grasped only through reflection as we are ignorant of it in our daily use. Imposing change from above will epically fail. Of all social institutions, language is the least amenable to initiative. The weight of collective inertia coupled with time renders all choice subject to arbitrary tradition.

Time wields another influence apparently contradictory to the first in explaining the rapid change of linguistic signs. A sign is proposed to alteration because it perpetuates itself, but what predominates in all change is the persistence of the old substance; disregard for the past is only relative. The principle of change is based on the principle of continuity. What predominates in all change is the persistence of the old substance. Unlike language, other human instituions are all based in varying degrees on the natural relations of things and all have of necessity adapted the means employed to the ends pursued. Language is limited by nothing in the choice of means, for apparently nothing would prevent the associating of any ideas whatsoever with just any sequence of sounds.

As it is a product of both the social force and time, no one can change anything about it, and on the other hand, the arbitrariness of its signs theoretically entaisl the freedom of establishing just any relationship between phonetic substance and ideas. Each of the two elements united in a sign maintains its own life to a degree unknown elsewhere: language evolves under the influence of all the forces which can affect either sounds or meanings.

Time changes all things. Language is a whole set of linguistic habits permitting an individual to understand be understood. This definition still leaves language outside its social context: the realization of language needs a community of speakers. Langugage never exists apart from a social fact. The linguistic sign is arbitrary for language as defined would therefore seem to be a system which is free and can be organized at will. It is not a purely logical basis that group psychology operates: one must consider everything that deflects reason in actual contacts between individuals. Time combined with social force is what prevents language from being altered.

STATIC AND EVOLUTIONARY LINGUISTICS:

Very few linguists suspect that the intervention of the factor of time creates difficulties peculiar to linguistics. Linguists, like economists, are concerned with a system for equating things of different orders, such as labor and wages. Language is a system of pure values which are determined by nothing except the momentary arrangement of its terms. A value, provided it is somehow rooted in things and in their natural relations as in economics, can to some extent be traced in time if we remember that it depends at each moment upon a system of coexisting values. Its link with things gives it, perforce, a natural basis, and judgments we base on such values are therefore never arbitrary; variability is limited. Natural data, of course, has no place in linguistics.

INNER DUALITY AND THE HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS:

Only by concentrating on one state can the linguist hope to comprehend change. The opposition between diachronic and synchronic studies of languages is absolute and allows no compromise. Everything diachronic in language is so only by virtue of speaking for it is in speaking that the germ of all change is found. It is launched by a certain number of individuals before it is accepted by general use. We are only aware of them until the community of speakers adopts their modifications as a whole. The history of any innovation there are always two distinct moments: where something sprang up in individual usage and when it became a fact of language, outwardly identical but adopted by the community. One looking synchronically at Old French cares not for tracing the history of a language from the thirteenth to the twelfth century. He works with similar facts in Bantu, Greek, or present day French. If each idiom is a closed system, then all idioms embody certain fized principles that the linguist meets again and again in passing from one to another. Historical study is no different for whether the linguist examines a definite period in the history of French or any language, everywhere he works with similar facts which he only need compare in order to establish the general truths of the diachronic class.

Thus, synchronic linguistics is concerned with the logical and psychological relations that bind together coexisting terms and form a system in the collective mind of speakers whereas diachronic linguistics will study relations that bind together successive terms not percieved by the collective mind but substituted for each other without forming a system,

LINGUISTIC VALUE FROM A CONCEPTUAL VIEWPOINT:

A word's value is its property of standing for an idea, but value differs from signification. Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others. Outside of langue, all values are apparently governed by the same paradoxical principle: a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing which the value is to be determined and similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value s to be determined. A word can be exchanged for a dissimialar thing, an idea, while also being compared to something of a similar nature, a word. Value is not fixed so long as one simply states that it can be exchanged for a given concept: its content is really only fixed by the concurrence of everything that exists outside of it. It is endowed not only with a signification but also and especially with a value, and this is something quite different.

LINGUISTIC VALUE FROM A MATERIAL VIEWPOINT:

The important thing is not how a word sounds, but the phonic differences that make it possible to distinguish between a word from all others. Every language forms its words on the basis of a system of sonorous elements, each element being a clearly delimited unit and one of a number of fixed ones. Phonics are characterized not by their own positive quality, but by the fact that they are distinct.

THE SIGN CONSIDERED IN ITS TOTALITY:

In language there are only differences. A difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set u, but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas, but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass of thought engenders a system of values and this system serves as the effective link between the phonic and psychological elements within each sign. Maintaining the parallelism between the two classes of differences is the distinctive function of the linguistic instittution.

The alteration of a word occasions a conceptual change and it is obvious that the sum of the ideas distinguished corresponds in principle to the sum of the distinctive signs. When two words are confused through phonetic alteration, the ideas that they express will also tend to become confused if only they have something in common. Comparing signs toward one another, we no longer speak of difference, the expression would not be fitting for it applies only to comparing two sound-images. Difference makes character just as it makes value and the unit.

SYNTAGMATIC AND ASSOCIATIVE RELATIONS:

In a language-state, everything is based on relations, but how do they function? Relations and differences between linguistic terms fall into two distinct groups, each of which generates a certain class of values. The opposition between the two classes gives a better understanding of the nature of each class. In discourse, words acquire relations based on the linear nature of language because they are chained together. A word acquires its value only because it stands in opposition to everything that precedes or follows it, or to both. Outside of discourse, words acquire relations of a different kind. Those having elements in common are associated in the memory, resulting in groups marked by diverse relations.