softskill's assigment (saussere language as social fact)

SAUSURE : LANGUAGE AS A SOCIAL FACT

By the end of the nineteenh century - apparently everything looks good at the time, and some still remain convincing for today – the equation of languages with biological spscies had largely been abandoned . This created a difficulty for the notion of linguistics as an academic discipline: if languages are not living species, in the sense are they 'things' that can be studied at all? The man in the street refers quite happily to 'French' as something which one can study, which possesses certain attributes, which resembles 'English' in some respects but differs from it in others; but, if 'French' is a thing, it is a very odd kind of thing. It obviously is not a concrete object like a table, or even like the stretch of terrain called 'France'.  You cannot, strictly speaking, see or hear 'French' - the French language. You can hear Gaston the waiter said “Pas si bete . . . “you can see a line of print in a copy of Le Monde; but how can we interpret a being called 'French' lying behind these and thousands of other concrete, observable phenomena? What sort of an entity could it be? The biological paradigm had treated the relationship between Gaston's speech and 'French' as akin to the relationship between a particular carrot and the species 'carrot': and, until the biological paradigm had to be given up anyway, this treatment seemed satisfying - even though one could see or eat only individual carrots, one appreciated that it made sense to talk about the species 'carrot' and to discuss, say, its genetic relationship with the species 'parsnip'. But, in the first place, the biological paradigm had fallen by the wayside; and, secondly, now that one thought about it that paradigm never really did offer a complete • answer to the problem under discussion anyway. In biology, while species are abstractions, at least individuals of a species are concrete – few things are more tangible than a carrot. But the linguistic analogue of a biological individual is a person's idiolect: and this, and almost all , if not all , the same as a broad abstraction of the concept of language .
We can not hear idiolect Gaston as a form ; we can only hear the idiolect examples - comments which he says that he saw a tip that we left off , and it does not have idiolect 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 .
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 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 .

At the end of 1906 he was persuaded to take over responsibility for a course on 'General linguistics and the history and comparison of the Indo-European languages' from a scholar who had had to give it up after thirty years ,Saussure taught such a course for the remainder of that session and in the sessions 1908-9 and 1910-11. In the first of these years Saussure limited himself exclusively to historical matters; but when he gave the course for the second time he included an introduction which deatT" father briefly with synchronic linguistics, "and in the third course, finally, a full semester was devoted to theoretical, largely synchronic linguistics. And then not long afterwards, in 1913, he "died, without having published any of this theoretical material. Several people had asked him to, but he always replied that the task of organizing his sketchy ideas into publishable form was too time-consuming to contemplate. but Two of his colleagues, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, who had been prevented by their own teaching duties from hearing Saussure's lectures on  generallinguistics, decided to reconstruct them from notes taken by students together with such lecture-notes as Saussure had left behind: the book they produced, the Cours de linguistique gintrale (Saussure 1916), which is a vehicle which are used by scholars in the world to comperehend Saussure's thought, and because this document that Saussure is known as the father of
twentieth-century linguistics.