De Saussure wanted to define language in such a way that it could be considered a thing, an object that could be studied scientifically (he required from this object to be invegistigable [one of the properties] without reference to its historical development).
La Parole = speaking [the way we speak] term used to refer to individual manifestations of Language.
Speaking includes the following properties: the sum of what people say, including individual constructions that are the consequence of a speaker's choice, acts of articulation that are equally matters of free choice, required to produce these constructions. [this interpretation makes 'speaking' conscious & fully individual product.
• La Parole includes anything that a speaker might say
Le Langage = La Parole + the rules of language
It has both the generality and the requirements of constraints found in grammatical rules. It includes both social and individual factors attributable to the individual speaker and that is why it is not pure and simple social fact.
• Le Langage encompasses anything a speaker might say as well as the constraints that prevent him or her from saying anything ungrammatical. [it has no principle of unity that would enable one to study it scientifically]
La Langue [it's a social fact] = Le Langage – La Parole [so these are just the rules, something we have in our minds, we can understand people talking thanks to rules]
It is the set of passively acquired habits we have been taught by our speech community, in terms of which we understand other speakers and produce combinations that other speakers of our community understand.
• When we hear La Parole of another community we receive the noises made, but not the social facts of the language
• When we hear La Parole within our own community we perceive the sounds as associated with social facts, according to a set of rules.
• La Langue contains the negative limits on what speaker must say if he or she is to speak a particular language grammatically.
These terms gave the beginning to Chomsky's division and dichotomy
To competence (La Langue) – knowledge of the linguistic rules and performance (La Parole) – generated from learner's underlying competence ability to use language.
La Langue it is a kind of code, algebra, according to De Saussure, ''a system of pure values that are determined by nothing except the momentary arrangement of terms.'' Viewed in this way la langue appears to be an abstraction. In order to make any study scientific we require ''a conventional simplification of the data'' to be examined. That is, we must abstract from some of the undenied concrete properties of the things a science studies in order to have a precisely definable object.
- Acts of speaking (la parole) are invariably individual, variable, whimsical, and inventive. There is no principle of unity within speech considered in this way, and, therefore, it is not amenable to scientific study. For a scientific study of anything we must have an object that ''holds still,'' since we want to count and measure it; la parole consists of an infinite number of individual choices, acts of articulation, and novel combinations. Its description, must, therefore, be infinite.
- La langue exists in the form of '' a sum of impressions deposited in the brain of each individual,'' which are ''almost like a dictionary of which identical copies have been distributed to each individual…it exists in each individually, yet it is common to all. Nor is it affected by the will of the depositaries.'' Since la langue is a ''deposit of signs which each individual has received'' from other speakers of the community, it is essentially a passive thing, as opposed to la parole , which is active. La language is a set of conventions that we all receive, ready-made, from previous speakers of the language.
No comments:
Post a Comment