SAUSSURE : Language as social fact

           SAUSSURE : Language as social fact

                Towards at the end of  XIX century - apparently everything looks good for the time, and some still remain convincing for the present - the language similarities with biology has been widely rejected . This raises the difficulty of understanding the language as an academic discipline : If the language is not the species alive , in the sense of whether the language is " stuff " that can be investigated ? A layman pleased that the French language is something that can be learned , which have certain devices and in some cases the same or similar to English but in other respects different ; but when the French language in an item and that item is something strange . It is clear that the language was not a concrete object such as a table or as a stretch of land called France . You can not see or hear the French language . You can hear is Gaston the waiter said " pas si bete ... " : You can see a line of printed letters on a sheet of newspaper " Le Monde " : but how can we interpret a being called the French language which is behind thousands and thousands of concrete phenomena that can be observed as in the two examples that? kind of form is that language ? paradigm of biology shows the relationship between the speech and language of France such as the relationship between carrot ( carrot ) and certain species of carrots : and to the rejection of the biological paradigm opinion , such opinion this is considered satisfactory - although one can only see or eat carrots , vote important enough to talk about carrots species and discuss , say , genetic relationship with species of potatoes . , but the first time biology has been thrown to the side of the road , the second , the already found that paradigm can not provide a complete answer to the ongoing discussion . In biology , because the species is an abstraction , not least the individual species are goods that are concrete , some kinds of goods can be easily felt than carrots . But the linguistic analogy to biological individual is idiolek ; and almost all , if not all , the same as a broad abstraction of the concept of language . We can not hear idiolek Gaston as a form ; we can only hear the idiolek examples - comments which he says that he saw a tip that we left off , and it does not have idiolek example parallels in biology . So although it is not regarded as a particular problem by linguists of the nineteenth century , the question " How does understanding a form called a language or a dialect of the underlying reality that can be felt rather than specific utterances ? Remain open at that time . People who answer that can satisfy experts as well as experts during her today is the Swiss scholar : Ferdinand de Saussure .

              Ferdinand de Saussure , his full name , was born in Geneva in 1857 , the son of the Huguenot families who moved from Lorraine during the French religious wars in the late sixteenth century . Although people now regard as the first Saussure provides a definition of the notion that so-called synchronic linguistics - the study of language support as the system contained in the given time , which is distinguished by historical linguistics ( which to distinguish Saussure called diachronic linguistics ) is for experts contemporaries is the only approach available for studying that time was - in his lifetime was not meant to make it famous . Saussure got educated as an ancient language , and successfully while still a young man published a book entitled Memoire sur lesysteme primitive dans les langues des Voyelles indo - europeennes ( 1878) . The book was published a few weeks after his birthday XXI : When he was a student in Germany . The book is one of the basic reconstruction of Proto- Indo- European language . Saussure gives Ecole Pratique des Hautes lecture Etudes in Paris from 1881 to 1891, before he returned to teaching in Geneva , all publishing , and almost all the lectures he gave , throughout his more than dealing with historical linguistics synchronic linguistics , with in-depth analysis about the various Indo- European languages ​​and not with the general theory that makes it famous now .

                 In fact , although Saussure produce his work on the theory of general linguistics at about 1890 ( Koerner , 1973: 29 ) , he seems reluctant to give it to someone else , and the story of how his ideas can go into publishing is a strange story . In late 1906 he was asked to take over responsibility in giving lectures on general linguistics and comparative history and languages ​​of the Indo - European from a scholar who has quit his service for 30 years ; Saussure taught the material on the rest of her student days and on the lectures in 1908-1909 and in 1910-1911 . In the first years of Saussure limit at only about historical matters ; but when he gave the two years he was also a brief introduction to post a synchronic linguistics , and the third lecture , the entire semester is used to provide synchronous linguistic theory . Shortly afterward he died , without a chance to publish any material that theory . Some people have been asked to publish , but he always answered that for preparing lecture materials very time-consuming , but two of his colleagues , Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye decided on a new fabric of the student lecture notes together with notes Saussure left college . The book they produced is called Cours de linguistique gererale ( Saussure 1916) is a medium that can be used by scholars in the world to understand the ideas of Saussure , Saussure and since this document is known as the father of twentieth -century linguist .