University of Batna 2

Faculty of Letters and Foreign Languages

Department of English
First year classes, groups: 7, 8, 9, and 10.
Course: Linguistics
Teacher: Dr. M. Messerhi
Email: [email protected]

Some Fundamental Concepts and Distinctions in Modern Linguistics

Modern linguistics is based on some fundamental concepts which were expounded by the most influential
linguists in the beginning of the twentieth century. The most important of these were:
- The European linguists, mainly the Swiss linguist Ferdinand De Saussure (1857-1913).
- The representatives of the American structural School, namely Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949)
and Noam Chomsky (1928)
The main ideas propounded by these linguists took the form of certain distinctions or dichotomies which
made it possible to understand the nature of language in a more systematic way. Some of these basic
dichotomies are discussed below:
1. The Langue/Parole distinction: Saussure (1916) made the distinction between LANGUE and
PAROLE.
A. Langue means the sum of all the rules and conventions regarding the combination of sounds,
formation of words and sentences, pronunciation and meaning. All these conventions
constitute Langue and are a product of social agreement. As Saussure (1916) put it “if we
embrace the sum of word-images stored in the mind of all individuals we could identify the
social bond that constitutes language. It is a storehouse filled by the members of a given
community through their active use, a grammatical system that has a potential existence in
each brain, or more specifically, in the brains of a group of individuals. For language is not
complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only within a collectivity”.
This means that:
- Langue is social, a set of conventions shared by all the speakers of a language
- Langue is abstract, as these particular conventions exist in the minds of the speakers who belong
to that society that has created the language.
B. Parole, on the other hand, belongs to the individual. When those conventions that exist in the
minds as Langue are used in a concrete form in actual speech or writing, they become
instances of Parole. Parole is the actual sounds and sentences produced by an individual
speaker or writer. It is concrete physical manifestation of the abstract langue that exist in the
mind.
This means parole is:
Individual: production of language in speech or writing
Concrete and physical, it makes use of the physiological mechanisms such speech organs in
uttering words and sentences.
Thus, it can be said that langue is “the language system” and parole is the “language
behaviour”
A useful analogy between language and parole is made by comparing it to a chess game. In
the game, the rules are determined and understood by all the players, but each game is
different and depends on the individual performances which differ from one player to another.
According to Saussure, we can only study langue and not parole. Because langue is a
well-defined homogenous object different from the heterogenous, unpredictable mass of
speech acts (parole).
 2. Competence/performance distinction: the American linguist Noam Chomsky (1965: 4) made
a similar distinction between COMPETENCE and PERFORMANCE.

A. Competence: is the native speaker’s knowledge of his language, his mastery of the system
rules, it is the abstract or the internal grammar that which enables a speaker to produce and
understand an infinite number of potential sentences.

B. Performance, on the other hand, is the production of actual sentences in use in real-life
situations.
According to Chomsky, since competence is ideal and gives a coherent picture of the
language, it is the subject study of linguistics.

3. The Linguistic sign and the signified/signifier distinction

The term sign is used to talk about something that stands in for something else. A linguistic sign means
the sounds that refer to some object (material or non-material). For example, dog is a series of sounds (a
linguistic sign). In English it refers to (signifies) an animal of the canine family. The animal it signifies
is called signifie, while the sounds or the word is called signifiant. According to Saussure the linguistic
sign is the central fact of language. The language system is made up of signs, and by putting signs
together, it is possible to create messages.
Saussure insisted that the linguistic sign has two aspects: a sound aspect and a meaning aspect. The two are
tightly linked within a speech community, and can be seen as being the two sides of the same playing card, but we
must nevertheless keep these two aspects of the sign separate from each other in our technical understanding of the
way in which language functions
The linguistic sign is made up of two parts: the signifier and the signified
A. The signifier is the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression it makes on our senses.
It is an essence of how we think on something in our heads even though you are not making a
sound, the idea of the sound help to guide your thoughts. Saussure called the signifier as the
sound image which the definition that the signifier has some sort of impact on our senses.
B. The signified is the concept (the meaning) or essence of something that the signifier is
referring to.
By combining a signifier or a sound image with a signified or a concept (mental image), it
becomes possible to create and share signs. The signifier and the signified work together to create
meaning one can not exist without the other, and this the purpose of language; to connect thoughts
and sounds, Saussure also argues that once a signifier and a signified are joined, they become
inseparable. Two faces of the same coin.
Saussure also claims that signs are arbitrary meaning that there is no natural connection between
signifier and signified.
Because signs are arbitrary, they must be agreed on a group of people to be effective (e.g., all
English speakers). Therefore, some languages have words for concepts that don’t exist in other
languages.
4. Synchrony versus Diachrony
Saussure maintains that language can be studied in two ways:
A. The first is that we can look at the language as it is (or was) at any particular point in time.
Thus, we might study the syntax of American English in the early twenty-first century, or the
phonology of seventeenth-century French or the patterns of compounding in Classical
Chinese. These are all synchronique studies (syn-‘alike’, chronos ‘time’).
B. The alternative is to look at the way in which a language develops or changes over time. In
this way we might consider the development of the English verb system, or changes in Arabic
phonology from the classical period until today. These are diachronique studies (dia-
‘through’, chronos ‘time’).

5. Syntagmatic versus Paradigmatic

A. syntagmatic is the linear or sequential relationship between elements of the same sentence. In
the example:
The cat sat on the mat the elements are said to be related to each other syntagmatically.
Together they form a SYNTAGM or construction.
B. Paradigmatic relationship: language is also structured in terms of the words (or other elements)
which are not there but which could have been. Each of the words in the first example could
have been replaced by a number of other possible words. Some examples are given in this
example:
The cat sat on the mat
This girl sits across your bed
That student walked over her car
The words in each of the columns in the above example are related to each other
paradigmatically. They are related by being alternative possible choices at a position in the
syntagm. While elements which are related syntagmatically are all present, elements which
are related paradigmatically are mostly absent: they are relationships of potential. Each of the
columns in the example can be called a PARADIGM