Langue and Parole, Saussure's most fundamental contribution in Linguistics

Langue and Parole

Simply translated, "

translation is misleading because those terms are almost synonyms. Jonathon Culler, an American

Deconstructionist who has written extensively on Saussure, defined

introduction to Wade Baskin's translation of the

"...Saussure's most fundamental contribution, on which all of modern linguistics rests, was

the step by which he postulated a suitable object for linguistic study. If linguistics tries to

concern itself with every fact relating to language, it will become a confused morass. The

only way to avoid this is to isolate a coherent object which will provide both a goal for

analysis and a principle of relevance. And that is precisely what he did, distinguishing with

a bold stroke between language as a system (

language in speech or writing (

"...This distinction between langue and parole has been important not only for linguistics

but for other disciplines as well, where it can be rendered as a distinction between

institution and event, or between the underlying system which makes possible various

types of behavior and actual instances of such behavior. Study of the system leads to the

construction of a model which represents the various possibilities and their derivation

within the system, whereas study of actual behavior leads to the construction of statistical

models which represent the probabilities of particular actions under specified conditions."

Roy Harris in his version of the CGL translates

bold and excellent translation). Three points are crucial to

is invented to explain the occurrence and distribution of forms in

relational character (its terms mutually define and compete with each other), and 3) it is an

"institution" or social construct and by definition the inheritance of the many.

La

explained

"It is a fund accumulated by the members of the community through the practice of

speech, a grammatical system existing potentially in every brain, or more exactly in the

brains of a group of individuals; for the language is never complete in any single

individual, but exists perfectly only in the collectivity..." (CGL, Harris translation, pg. 13).

Note that this definition avoids aligning

dialect: the "collectivity" remains undefined.

langue" and "parole" are "language" and "speech". However, such alangue and parole in theCourse as follows:la langue) and the actual manifestations ofla parole)..."la langue using the terms linguistic structure (ala langue: 1) its theoretical character (itparole), 2) its systematic orlangue then is shared linguistic structure. In the third chapter of the Course, Saussurela langue as follows:la langue with any particular definition of a language or a