Saussure: language as social fact

• Nowadays one thinks of Saussure first and foremost as the scholar who defined the notion of 'synchronic linguistics'-the study of languages as systems existing at a given point in time, as opposed to the historical linguistics wich had seemed to his contemporaries the only possible approach to the subject-in his own lifetime this was far from his main claim to fame.
• Saussure worked out his ideas on general linguistic theory as early as the 1890s, he seems to have been very diffident about passing them on to others, and the story of how these ideas entered the public domain is a rather odd one.

Social fact

• Émile Durkheim, the founder of sociology as a recognized empirical discipline: to understand what Saussure means by calling languages 'social facts', we must spend some time examining Durkheim´s use of the term. durkheim propounded the notio of 'social fact' in his Rules of Sociological Method. According to Durkheim, the task of sociology was to study and describe a realm of phenomena quiet distinct in kind of both from the phenomena of the physical world and from the phenomena dealt with by psychology, although just as real as these other categories of phenomena.
• the physical facts which can be tangibly observed-what Saussure calls parole, 'speaking'-and the general system of langue, 'language', which those physical phenomena exemplify but which is not itself a physical phenomenon. the concrete data of parole are produced by individual speakers, but 'language is not complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only within a collectivity'.
• Saussure described language as 'a product of the collective mind of linguistic groups'.

Chomsky

• One of the most widely influential features of Chomsky´s approach to language is the distinction he draws between competence and performance.
• Chomsky´s 'competence', as the name suggests, is an attribute of the individual, a psychological matter; he often defines competence as 'the speaker-hearer´s knowledge of his language'

Hilary Putnam

• She has recently developed an argument which seems to show that issue is more than a question of taste and that at least one important aspect of language, namely semantic structure, must be regarded as a social rather than as a psychological fact.

There is a further problem about the langue/parole distinction, and here Saussure´s position is harder to defend.

Saussure´s assignment of syntax to parole rather than to langue is linked in another way with the question of linguistic structure as social rather than psychological fact.