De Saussure

De Saussure draws a firm dichotomy between

language and langue, speaking and parole; he
considers speaking to be historically prior to
language in its genesis. Speaking is necessary for
the establishment of language.
Saussure as an internalist is interested in the study
of the linguistic system from the inside, how it
functions, what are the rules and the laws that
govern that system?
Language possesses 4 properties: Passive,
receptive, collective and homogeneous.
Passive; language is deposited in the human brain,
it is not used when the speaker is asleep for
example, though, it remains intact
Receptive; it interacts with other languages,
borrows and receives from them.
Collective; in order to be established, language
should emerge in a communal context. The
presence of a community is necessary for a lgge in
order to be shared by its different members.
Homogeneous; all the members of the community
must stick and abide by the same rules and follow
the same instructions. Nobody can introduce any
change and impose it on the rest of the community
because lgge is shared and used evenly.
Unlike language, speaking has different
characteristics. It’s active, executive, individual,
and heterogeneous
Language processing doesn’t mean only inquoting
but also dequoting (speaking and comprehending)
Prior knowledge is necessary to perform a speech
(to speak) the same like a chess game where
moves are necessary to play. Speaking is a
reflection to the language but even without prior
knowledge, people communicate and perform
speaking because they tend not to restrict
themselves to any abiding rules, they just speak
which accounts for the deviation from rules people
are usually trapped in as well as the ill constructed
sentences and utterances they produce.
Meanwhile, language passes through stages of
fluctuations.
At first a community performs speaking and
examines in the meanwhile the set of features that
are probable to become gradually abiding and
compulsive rules of lgge. The rules are shared
unconsciously but conventionally.
Is language as an abstraction, a spoken or a
written form?
De Saussure assumes that language is the speech.
The notion of value is recurrent with De Saussure’s
analysis; it is according to his approach the
difference between two statics; like a particular
phoneme gets its value and proper specificity outta
the difference between the places and the manners
of articulation.
De Saussure excludes the diachronic approach
based on time to be a standing factor in studying
lgge. He adopts instead a synchronic approach that
focuses on the lgge itself as it is spoken in a
precise given period by a precise and given
community. He reckons it to be contributing to the
study of the systemacity of lgge. He distrusts the
recourse to the diachronic approach as it unveils
nothing but the stages of change undergone by a
lgge throughout history.

The first stage wherein a msg getsborn is the brain

of the speaker. It takes at first an ideational
aspect. As language’s ultimate aim is to facilitate
and hold conversations between different
speakers, the vague nature of the idea makes
communication almost impossible. For that reason,
msg should pass through a verbalization process.
This latter requires an organizational pattern
according to which the different terms get
organized in a syntagmatic relationship following a
linear strategy. The meaning of the msg doesn’t
depend on the number of terms used in the
sentence but rather on the way they are grouped
and organized which implies and reveals the vital
importance of the organizational pattern in a
sentence. Besides, every term is conditioned by the
one preceding it and conditions itself the term that
comes next after it. Moreover, Every term in the
sentence submits to a paradigmatic relationship
that relates it to the set of terms that existed
already in the mind of the speaker before he opts
for that very term. These terms are grouped in a
constellation as a whole set wherein only one term
the speaker is concerned with.
Edward Sapir

The main focus in linguistics for De Saussure is the

systemacity of Lgge
Sapir envisages a different approach of linguistics
as he defines as an objective behind studying it the
existent relation btw the lgge itself and other
human interests. Lgge for Sapir is closely
connected to culture; the socially inherited
assemblage of practices and beliefs that determine
the texture of our lives.
Sapir believes that if we eliminate society, the
individual will never learn to talkthe importance
of the social environment.
On the other side, Chomsky minimizes the role of
society asserting that the essentials of lgge are
biologically determined and the environment
serves to nothing but activating the genetic
competence
While De Saussure fixes his ultimate objective from
studying linguistics to the observation of lgge
functioning inside the linguistic system, Sapir
restores back the importance of speaking claiming
that lgge exists and sustains as long as it’s actually
practiced ; spoken and heard, written and read.
Competence which is the set of rules and
knowledge deposited in the brain of the speaker
constitutes the main focus and the most needed
requirement according to De Saussure to establish
a linguistic system.
The environment, being one of the main
components in the establishment of lgge according
to Sapir, is diminished in terms of its importance
bcz it doesn’t relate to the abstract and the
systemacity of a lgge.
Sapir assigns the study of lgge systemacity to the
pedagogues whose main concern is to identify the
right way how to speak and perform a lgge while
prescribing the set of rules upon which the system
stands and gets based. This approach is
discredited by Sapir for it doesn’t invoke any of the
cultural specificities of the lgge environment within
which it got born.
Both descriptive and prescriptive approaches do
not serve to identifying the cultural environment
sapirs stresses. At the contrary, their at last output
is some sets of rules governing the system with no
reference to the speaking.
Pavlov discovered 2 signaling systems in the brain
of human beings:
• The concrete entity that I can perceive using
my senses
• The concrete percept is converted into a
concept
The percept must be abstracted and
conceptualized which is one of the properties of
human language (displacement)
The use of a linguistic medium serves to convert
the percept into concept
Animals can’t displace the percept into a concept
because their brains cannot retain the percept and
conceptualize it.
The speaker inquotes his speech using a set of
items and intending to communicate a certain
meaning
The msg (set of words) stimulates the listener’s
brain, then, this latter selects the words he thinks
they carry out the meaning and opts for a precise
organizational pattern, thus making the msg
understood.
Inner speech= the formulation of the idea in the
brain
The outer speech= the uttering of the msg so that
to communicate a meaning.