Langue and parole

Langue and parole is a theoretical linguistic dichotomy distinguished by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics.^[1]

The French term langue ('[an individual]

In contrast, parole ('speech') refers to the concrete instances of the use of langue, including texts which provide the ordinary research material for linguistics.^[1]

Background and significance

Consequently, Saussure rejects other contemporary views of language and argues for the autonomy of linguistics. According to Saussure, general linguistics is not:[1]

• the study of human mind, as thought by structural psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt (and, later, generative and cognitive linguists).
• the study of evolutionary psychology or the biological research of living organisms as claimed by Charles Darwin^[3] and the evolutionary linguists^[4] (which would later include 'usage-based linguistics' which also argues for a feedback loop between the speakers, but without the emergent langue phenomenon).^[5]
• an empirical discipline in the same way that natural sciences are because the true object of study has no physical substance. Saussure however argues that linguistic structures can be scientifically uncovered through text analysis.

Linguistics, then, in Saussure's conception, is properly regarded as the study of semiology, or languages as semiotic (sign) systems.

Meaning of the terms

Langue

French has two words corresponding to the English word language:^[6]

1. langue, which is primarily used to refer to individual languages such as French and English; and
2. langage, which primarily refers to language as a general phenomenon, or to the human ability to have language.

Langue therefore corresponds to the common meaning of language, and the pair langue versus parole is properly expressed in English as 'language versus speech',

From a formal linguistics perspective, Saussure's concept of language and speech can be thought of as corresponding, respectively, to a formal language and the sentences it generates. De Saussure argued before Course in General Linguistics that linguistic expressions might be algebraic.^[7]

Building on his insights,

Despite this success, American advocates of the natural paradigm managed to fend off European structuralism by making its own modifications of the model. In 1946, Zellig Harris introduced transformational generative grammar which excluded semantics and placed the direct object into the verb phrase, following Wundt's psychological concept, as advocated in American linguistics by Leonard Bloomfield.^[8] Harris's student Noam Chomsky argued for the cognitive essence of linguistic structures,^[11] eventually giving the explanation that they were caused by a random genetic mutation in humans.^[12]

References