Skip to main content

Explain the terms langue and parole given by Ferdinand de Saussure using an example.

The concept of Langue (language) and Parole (speech) was given by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. These terms appeared first in the book “A Course In General Linguistics” (Cours de linguistique générale) – a series of class notes that were compiled and published by Saussure’s students in 1916 after his death.


Saussure, a linguist from the Structuralist school of linguistics, believed Language to be a system of signs. Each sign conventionally signifies something. Also, the relationship between a sign and what it signifies is arbitrary. It is important to note here that Saussure defined language in purely structural terms.


Langue, then, for Saussure, is nothing but all the abstract rules and conventions of this system of signs (or language). These rules, as we know, do not occur in the world explicitly (as linguists, we only try to study and describe these rules).


It is interesting to know that every language user has an instinctive, innate understanding of these rules that make up language. Note that this statement was not actually given by Saussure. Structuralism in language did not describe language as an instinct (Pinker, 1995) or as a mentalist, cognitive object (Chomsky). These assumptions were postulated in later studies.


Nest, Saussure said that language users make use of Langue to produce “actual utterances”. These actual utterances (Parole), in this way, make concrete use of the abstract rules of languages.


For example, language users can have the concept of past tense in their language. They would know in an abstract fashion that auxiliary verbs get inflected for past tense in their language. Hence, English language users would use the auxiliary verb “was” for describing things of past. Similarly an abstract understanding of the rules for plurality would tell him to use “was” in singular contexts and the auxiliary verb “were” in case the context is plural. Similarly, they would have understanding of the rule that says addition of the suffix –ing to a verb is for progressive aspect or continuing action. This abstract understanding of the rules for marking a verb with aspect, making an auxiliary into past tense, singular or plural agreement, etc. is only a very small part of Langue. Langue is a system of so many rules and conventions. When language users actually make utterances about past events, each such utterance constitutes Parole. Hence, the utterance “They were sleeping” would be a part of Parole.


When a child acquires languages, he actually makes generalizations and forms hypothesis about these rules from the linguistic environment. As linguists, we try to explicitly state these rules, but these rules do not actually occur in nature as such.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...
Post a Comment
Read more