Page 12 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes The difference between descriptive (synchronic) and historical (diachronic) linguistics can be
illustrated by the following diagram of Ferdinand de Saussure, who was the first person to stress
the necessity of distinguishing between the two approaches:
In the diagram, (figure 1.4), axis AB is the synchronic, static axis. It can intersect at any point with
XY, the moving, diachronic axis.

What do you mean by Synchronic and Diachronic?

Throughout the nineteenth century linguistic research was very strongly historical in character.
One of the principal aims of the subject was to group languages into families on the basis of their
independent developments from a common source, or to study language change. The description
of particular languages was made subsidiary to this general aim, and there was little interest in
the study of the language of a given community without reference to historical considerations.
Saussure’s distinction between the diachronic and synchronic investigation of the language is a
distinction between these two opposing viewpoints. Nevertheless, valid diachronic work has to be
based on good synchronic work, because no valid statements about linguistic change can be made
unless good descriptions of a language do exist. Similarly a synchronic statement may well reflect
certain historical developments, for example, two vowels of reel and real are described as being
basically different because the historical facts show different sources of the ee and the ea.

x

A B

y
Figure 1.4

1.4.2 Language and Parole
Ferdinand de Sassure made a sharp distinction between three main terms—le langage, la langue,
and la parole, and then concentrated on two of them. He envisaged le langage (human speech as
a whole) to be composed of two aspects, which he called langue (the language system) and parole
(the act of speaking).
Le langage
Le langage has no exact equivalent in English, it embraces the faculty of language in all its various
forms and manifestations.
Le langage is the faculty of human speech present in all normal human beings due to heredity, but
which requires the correct environmental stimuli for proper development. It is our faculty to talk
to each other. Taken as a whole it is many-sided and heterogeneous; straddling several areas
simultaneously—physical, physiological and psychological—it belongs to the individual and to
society; we cannot put it into any category of human facts for we cannot discover its unity.
Langage, thus is a universal behaviour trait—more of interest to the anthropologist or biologist
than to the linguist, who commences his study with langues and paroles. To quote Saussure ‘La
langue est pour nous le langage moins la parole”— Language is for us le langage less speech.
La Langue
Langue, according to Saussure, is the totality (the ‘collective fact’) of a language, deducible from
an examination of the memories of all the language users. It is a storehouse, ‘the sum of word-

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