Saussure: language as social fact

By the end of the 19th century, the equation of languages with biological species had largely been
abandoned. This created a difficulty for the notion of linguistics as an academic discipline. Although
it was not typically felt to be problematic by linguists of the nineteenth century, the question: How
does it make sense to postulate entities called language or dialects underlying the tangible reality
of particular utterances? in fact remained open during that period. The man who answered this was
Saussure and he was the scholar who defined the notion of synchronic linguistics, the study of
languages as systems existing at a given point in time.
Two of his colleagues, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye decided to reconstruct lecture-notes that
Saussure had left behind: the book they produced, the Cours de linguistique gnrale. And in this
document he is recognized as the father of twentieth-century.
According to Saussure there is an essentially systematic character to the synchronic facts of a
language which he claims to be lacking in diachrony. Saussures concept of an tat de langue as a
network of relationships in which the value of each element ultimately depends, directly or
indirectly, on the value of every other.
A language comprises a set of signs each sign being the union of a significant with a signifi.
According to Saussure, the changes which actually occur in the history of a language are in no way
dependent on the effect they will have on the system. A language, according to Saussure, is an
example of the kind of entity which certain sociologists call social facts. In Saussures view of
syntax he worried of two terms: parole (speaking) and langue (language). The parole produced by
individual speakers meanwhile the langue is a collectivity. Saussure argued that langue must be a
social fact on the grounds that no individual knows his mother-tongue completely.
mile Durkheim, the founder of sociology as a recognized empirical discipline: to understand what
Saussure means by calling languages social facts. durkheim propounded the notion of social fact
in his Rules of Sociological Method. According to Durkheim, the task of sociology was to study and
describe a realm of phenomena quiet distinct in kind of 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.
The physical facts which can be tangibly observed-what Saussure calls 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 collectivity. Saussure
described language as a product of the collective mind of linguistic groups.
Diachronic and synchronic view of linguistics
1. Diachronic view

 Diachronic linguistics views the historical development of a language.

We can go back and forth in time, watching the language with all its features change.
E.g. the change in sound system of English from old English to modern English
2. Synchronic view
Synchronic linguistics views a particular state of a language at some given point in time.
This could mean Modern English of the present day, or the systematic analysis of the system of
Shakespeares English.
E.g. the modern system of modern English
Saussure postulated the priority of synchrony: no knowledge of the historical development of a
language is necessary to examine its present system.
Saussure's concept of an itat de langue as a network of relationships in which the value of each element
ultimately depends, directly or indirectly, on the value of every other. Saussure invites us to picture a
language as 'a series of contiguous subdivisions marked off on both the indefinite plane of jumbled ideas
(A) and the equally vague plane of sounds

Why does Saussure say that diachronic linguistics lacks '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 Saussure meant more than just that his contemporaries neglected the systematic aspect of the
phenomena they described: he felt that historical sound-changes are in a sense intrinsically independent
of systems.
Saussure makes this statement about the random nature of diachronic processes as if it were a truism,
needing only to be uttered to be accepted. This it is certainly not. It is entirely conceivable that historical
changes might be determined, at least in part, by the effects they have on the synchronic system - so that,
for example, changes which would create too much ambiguity simply do not occur.

what sort of entities did Saussure take 'languages' to be? Saussure answered this question in terms of the
new science of sociology. A language, according to Saussure, is an example of the kind of entity which
certain sociologists call 'social facts'. To a reader unversed in the theoretical writings of sociology this
may sound as if Saussure was saying merely that languages are social phenomena, which would be a very
uninspiring statement of the obvious.
Durkheim propounded the notion of 'social fact' in his Rules of Sociological Method (1895). According to
Durkheim, the task 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.

'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.
We must draw a distinction 'between the physical facts which can be tangibly observed - what Saussure calls
parade, 'speaking' - and the general system of tongue; '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 collectivity'

Durkheim's notions of 'collective mind' and 'collective ideas' are far from obviously correct. Durkheim
made some remarkable sociological discoveries, notably in his work on Suicide (1897), which showed
that despite the considerable year-to-year fluctuations in suicide rates there were some striking
constancies in the relative frequency of suicide in various European nations.
Nobody is claiming that he adopted Durkheim's theories in slavish detail. What is claimed is that
Saussure's discussion of language took for granted a general approach to the philosophy of society which
was 'in the air' at the time and which Durkheim had done more than anyone else to create and to express;
to deny this would strain credulity, in view of passages in the Cours already cited.

It is Saussure's view of language as social fact and the related distinction he draws between langue and
parole which form the most contentious elements of his structure of ideas. Perhaps surprisingly, for
several decades these notions passed more or less unchallenged by linguists whom one might have
expected to be relatively unsympathetic .
One of the most widely influential features of Chomsky's approach to language is the distinction he draws
between competence and performance, a distinction somewhat reminiscent of Saussure's langue v. parole.
Chomsky himself actually identifies his notion of linguistic competence with Saussure's langue. But there
is a crucial difference, which Chomsky seems not to appreciate.
Chomsky's 'competence', as the name suggests, is an attribute of the individual, a psychological matter; he
'often defines competence as 'the speaker-hearer's knowledge of his language'. For Chomsky, as for his
American predecessors, the individual's idiolect is primary; the 'language* of a wider community or
nation is a secondary concept, a convenient way of referring to a large number of individual linguistic
competences that are similar except for minor details. For Saussure, just the opposite is true: 'language . . .
exists perfectly only within a collectivity'.

However, the philosopher Hilary Putnam has recently developed an argument (Putnam 1973, 1975) which seems to
show that the issue is more than a question of taste and that at least one important- aspect of language, namely
semantic structure, must be regarded as a social rather than as a psychological fact. Despite my instinctive
preference for Chomsky's approach to this question, I must admit that Putnam strongly vindicates Saussure as
against Chomsky.

Indeed, Putnam argues, one can make the same point with much more realistic examples. Putnam claims
that, as a town-dweller, his own concept of 'beech' is in no way different from his concept of 'elm' - he
thinks of each as deciduous trees and nothing more; yet it would be wrong to say that 'elm' and 'beech' are
synonyms for Putnam, since he knows as well as anyone else that they are names of different species.
There are two sorts of tools in the world: there are tools like a hammer or a screwdriver which can be
used by one person; and there are tools like a steamship which require the cooperative activity of a
number of persons to use. Words have been, thought of too much on the model of the first sort of tool.
There is a further problem about the langue /parole distinction, and here Saussure's position is harder to
defend. The stock of meaningful units - morphemes as we nowadays call them, though Saussure did not
use the term- with values defined by their paradigmatic contrasts, constitute the system Saussure called
langue. When we speak, however, we string morphemes into sequences: words, phrases, sentences.
Whereas it makes sense to think of a linguistic community as making available to its speakers a system of
contrasting morphemes, it hardly seems that we could alternatively think of the community as making
available a system of contrasting sentences; the sentences of a language do not form a limited set

Saussure's assignment of syntax to parole rather than to langue is linked in another way with the question
of linguistic structure as social rather than psychological fact. As we have seen, Saussure argued that
langue must be a social fact on the grounds that no individual knows his mother-tongue completely; and I
suggested that this confused two issues - there are many patterns of behaviour which one 'knows how to'
perform without necessarily 'knowing' much about them in the conscious, verbalizable, 'knowing that
something is the case' sense of 'know'.
For instance, I know how to ride a bicycle in the sense that I can do so in practice, but I could say next to
nothing about how the complex balancing-act is achieved. Certainly speakers do not know the structure of
their language in the 'knowing-that' sense (they cannot give a full and accurate description of it); but to
deny that a language is a psychological fact is surely to deny that speakers know their language perfectly
in the 'know-how-to' sense, which is a quite different and less obviously reasonable thing to say.
Any Englishman regularly utters faultless examples of English relative clauses or compound tenses, but
not one in a thousand could accurately explain how such constructions are formed. When it comes to
vocabulary, by contrast, on the whole speakers can with considerable success identify the words of their
language and say what the words mean.

The distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that seems to vanish or at least greatly diminish,
here. So, from his own point of view, Saussure was not really confusing separate issues; and we have
already considered Putnam's argument that the 'dictionary' aspect of a language must be treated as a social
rather than a psychological fact. Saussure's sociological approach to language on the one hand, and his
concentration on vocabulary on the other, thus turn out to be principles each of which supported the other.
Because Saussure thought of a language as inhering in a society, he treated it as a system of signs rather
than as a system of sentences - sentences seemed to be a matter of the individual speaker's use of the
language, therefore a question of parole rather than langue. Conversely, because Saussure thought of a
language as a system of signs, he was forced to think in sociological terms: it may make sense to describe
the syntax of an idiolect, but no individual is master of the range of semantic relationships which
determine the meanings of the words he uses.