Ferdinand de Saussure

1857 - 1913

Linguistics: What it Is
Writing of the neogrammarians, Saussure notes that their contribution was in placing the results of comparative studies in their historical perspective and thus linking the facts in their natural order. Thanks to them, language is no longer looked upon as an organism that develops independently but as a product of the collective mind of linguistic groups (5).

Organic Model vs. Collective Mind

What does Saussure mean by a Collective Mind?

Collective Mind
Saussure never makes himself completely clear on this point, but the implication is something like The cumulative linguistic capacity of a group as mediated by language. He probably would add if pressed as impacted by non-linguistic phenomena (external linguistics), such as politics, economics, war, etc.

There is an old linguists joke: A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

Scope of Linguistics
a) 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 language of each family; Historical Linguistics

b) To determine the forces that are permanently and universally at work in all languages, and to deduce the general laws to which all specific historical phenomena can be reduced; and
c) To delimit and define itself (6).

The origins of structural analysis and why Levi-Straus was so fascinated

An odd kind of task for a field of knowledge

Speech, Speaking, and Language

Speechthat is the abstract capacity to communicate with signs of whatever type (which is what Saussure means by speech)is a complex object, meaning that it is only possible as we understand it through the combination of a number of realms or domains. In his relentlessly dualistic mode of thinking, Saussure isolates the object of linguistics through a series of binary reduction.

The First Reduction: Material to Psychophysiological

First, speech always involves components that are internal to humans that is psychological and physiologicalas well as those that are external and material.
Linguistics, ala Saussure, will only be interested with that part of speech which is internal, i.e. the psycho-physiological
But, as with all of his binaries, he insists that the two are inseparable in execution: there is no speech that does not depend utterly on some material substrateeven internal speech since such becomes possible only after learning to use language which learning depends on the material.

Irony: Though the subject of linguistics is internal to organisms, it will depend completely on the external.

The Second Reduction: Execution to Reception

Every concrete instance of speech involves both someone speaking and someone hearing, an active and a passive participant. More generally we can say that in speech there are two sides, the executive and the receptive. The executive side, paradigmatically oral is always an active and therefore individual and willed aspect of speech; the receptive side is paradigmatically aural and passive and is governed by rules that originate in the collective, is therefore, paradoxically social.

The Third Reduction: Psycho-Physiological to Psychological

Even as speech involves both oral and aural components, so it also involves both bodily and mental aspects.

Linguistics, ala Saussure, is only interested in the mental or psychologicalthough again he readily admits that such are completely parasitic on the physiological aspects of speech.

The Fourth Reduction: Speech to Speaking and Language

Speechmeaning the abstract human ability to communicate with signsparses out in to two components: Speaking (parole): the actual, and always individual, act of articulating a particular string of syllables in time and space; Language (langue): the abstract, systematic aspect of speech that is only perfectly present in the linguistic community as a whole. The primary object of linguists is langue.

Language Defined
But what is language? It is not to be confused with human speech, of which it is only a definite part. It is both a social product of the faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty. Languageis a self-contained whole and a principle of classification (Saussure p. 9).

Language as Social
Language is not complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only within a collectivity (14). Why might this be so? What is he suggesting about language here?

Language
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 becomes associated with a concept. It is the social side of speech, outside the individual who can never create nor modify it by himself; it exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by members of a community. Moreover, the individual must always serve an apprenticeship in order to learn the functioning of language; a child assimilates to it only gradually (Saussure p. 14). WWBS?

The Fifth Reduction: The Sign to Signifier and Signified

Linguistics is concerned with units that are completely psychological. These units Saussure refers to as signs. Signs themselves predictably decompose in to two parts, the signifier and the signified.

The Signifier
The reason for the dual nature of the sign is that each sign is a mapit combines two disparate elements: a sound and a concept. The sound in question, however, is neither the spoken sound nor the material wave as it travels through the air or other media, but the heard sound, as it is processed by the brain and interpreted by consciousness.

That is, the sound attached to the sign as signifier is a sound-image, or the mental mapping of the sound

The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image. The latter is not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses. The sound image is sensory, and if I happen to call it material, it is only in that sense, and by way of opposing it to the other term of the association, the concept, which is general more abstract (Saussure p.66).

Reductive Summary
[Linguistics] Psycho-physiological Reception (aural) Psychological Language (langue) Social Signifier / Signified [Not Linguistics] Material Execution (oral) Physiological Speaking (parole) Individual Signs

About Signs and their Stability

1) The Arbitrary nature of the sign 2) The multiplicity of signs necessary to form any language 3) The over-complexity of the system 4) Collective inertia toward innovation

Another Reduction: Time to Timelessness

The first thing that strikes us when we study the facts of language is that their succession in time does not exist insofar as the speaker is concerned. He is confronted with a state. That is why the linguist who wishes to understand a state must discard all knowledge of everything that produced it and ignore diachrony (81).

Synchronic Linguistics
Language is a system of pure values A value is a distinction within a system made up entirely of distinctions, though such distinctions must per force be associated with some mark, sound, image or object. Thus in chess, a knight is the piece that can, within the rules, be moved in a particular way, as differentiated by contrast with other piecespawns, bishops, rooks, queens and kingsthat can only be moved in some other fashion.

Value and Signification

Signification is the naming aspect of a sign, the question a link between signifier and signified (sound-image and concept); value is the placing aspect of a sign, relating it to other signs. All values are doubly and paradoxically determined in that they are determined by their exchangeability with both (1) Dissimilar things (2) Similar things Thus a x-dollars for example can be exchanged for a certain amount of bread, gas, video games, etc. and it is comparable to other dollar amounts. A $5 bill is equal in value to another $5 bill, and that value is doubly determined by the amount/type of dissimilar things the can be exchanged for, and the amount type of currency/coin they equal, e.g. 5 x $1 bills, or 20 quarters.

Paradigmatic & Syntagmatic

Language is, then, a system of pure difference, in which differences and similarities fix linguistic meanings in specific contexts. a word can be exchanged for something dissimilar, an idea; besides, it can be compared with something of the same nature, another word. Its value is therefore not fixed so long as one simply states that it can be exchanged for a given concept, i.e. that it has this or that signification: one must also compare it with similar values, with other words that stand in opposition to it. Its content is really fixed only by the concurrence of everything that exists outside of it (115).

More on Value
Being part of a system, it [a word] is endowed not only with a signification but also and especially with a value, and this is something quite different (115). Examples: French: mouton = English sheep in signification, but not in value. Why? Because the French word stands for both the thing that goes bah in the field munching grass and the thing on the platter ready to be eaten. English uses two words, sheep and mutton where French has only one.