SAUSSURE: LANGUAGE AS A SOCIAL FACT
Towards the end of the XIX century - apparently everything looks good for the time, and some still remain convincing for the present - the similarities of language 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 considered as stuff and that stuff 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 the waiter Gaston said "pas si bete ...": You can see a line of prints letters on a sheet of newspaper "Le Monde":but how can we interpret a form 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 people can only see or eat carrots, people important enough votes to talk about carrots species and discuss, say, genetic relationship with species potatoes. But the first time biologist have been thrown to the side of the road ; second , people have contend that paradigm can not provide a complete answer to the ongoing session. In biology , because the species is an abstraction , at 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 abstraction from the broad 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 behind , and examples idiolek it does not have 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 contemporary her today is the Swiss scholar : Ferdinand de Saussure.
Mongin 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 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 of 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 work more related to historical linguistics than 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 produces his work on linguistic theory in general 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 in the remaining years of college and in the years 1908-1909 and in 1910-1911 . In the first year college Saussure limit just 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 along with lecture notes left by Saussure. 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,and since this document is known as the father of twentieth-century linguist.
