Annika Lamberg
Paper 8
Both Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky have been enormously influential in the field of linguistic study, and while Saussure is widely recognised as the founding father of modern linguistics, it is Chomsky’s ideas that are generally accepted as the guiding principles of linguistic inquiry. Saussure’s notions of the nature of language and the object of linguistic study were revolutionary in his time, and they generated a profound change in linguistics among other fields. One of his most prominent ideas was the separation of langue from parole, distinguishing the linguistic system from its observable expression. Chomsky, on the other hand, devised the concepts of I-language and E-language, which, while corresponding to the Saussure’s notions in some ways, reveal the fundamental difference between the Chomskyan and Saussurean views of language.
In Chomsky’s view language is a mental organ, a phenomenon belonging within the realm of psychology, and, Chomsky argues, ultimately biology. His I-language is part of the mental language faculty, a basic human characteristic that enables us to acquire any language we are exposed to. Chomsky believes language to be innate, and its inherent design features, such as arbitrariness and recursion, cannot be influenced by environmental factors. For Chomsky, human language is an attribute akin to for instance our numerical ability: it can be influenced to some extent by external factors, such as education, but ultimately it is genetically specified. The human language faculty develops from an initial state, and acquires its individual properties that separate it from other mental grammars due to individual experiences. Therefore, there are no two identical mental grammars, which precludes the existence of entities such as “English” or “French”. As all mental grammars are different in varying degrees, it is impossible to isolate a single true “English” grammar. People who have undergone similar linguistic experiences acquire mental grammars that are similar enough to enable communication. (Isac, Reis 2008) Chomsky proclaims I-language as the true aim of linguistic investigation, and this I-linguistics approach studies the mental grammars of individuals, and it attempts to discover and describe what the speakers already instinctively know about their language.
Saussure’s linguistic system, langue, is a social fact, and it can be compared to other institutions such as the legal system. (Zegarac, 2006) It dictates the use of language, and the speakers draw from langue to produce speech, or in Saussurean terms, parole. Saussure’s notion of langue is derived from his tenet of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. The arbitrariness of the linguistic sign means that there is no direct correlation between a word, the signifier, and the concept it refers to, the signified. So, not knowing the meaning of the word ‘house’, a person would have no way of inferring that it refers to a building of some sort based on the combination of letters or sounds. This means that in theory any word could be used to designate a house, and as such the relationship between the signifier and the signified is entirely arbitrary. According to Saussure, each linguistic sign derives its meaning from the way it relates to all other signs in the linguistic system, and as such is an absolutely relational entity. To define these signs, linguistics must look at their interrelationships in the linguistic system, and therefore Saussure isolates langue as the primary aim of linguistic inquiry.
Thus, Saussure and Chomsky agree that an underlying system exists beneath the manifestations of language, and that linguistics as a science should aspire to uncover the governing principles of this system. However, the fundamental difference between Saussurean and Chomskyan notions of language lies in the way Saussure sees language as a social fact, which is a characterisation of the collective mind. Langue something that is relative to a society, and it exists perfectly only within that society, which means that language to Saussure is completely external, and while the speakers combine and choose elements of langue to produce parole, the langue as a system exists independently of the human mind. This, naturally, is the opposite of Chomsky’s view of language as a mental entity. From this follows that for Saussure language cannot exist until there is a collection of speakers who create it by forming a social contract, in other words language as a faculty is acquired, whereas the Chomskyan language faculty is innate, biological and present in the brain of each individual. Another distinction between the notions of Chomsky and Saussure is that Saussurean langue is inevitably identical to all speakers within a collectivity, while in Chomsky’s view there are as many variations of language as there are speakers.
Chomsky, however, does introduce the concept of externalised language, or E-language, which, like Saussurean language, is a social phenomenon. The E-language approach to linguistics views language as corpus of data, which is to be analysed, and it relates this data to social behaviour. This contrasts with I-linguistics, which is concerned with what a speaker knows about a language and the origin of the knowledge, and as I-language is considered to be knowledge encoded in the human brain, it focuses on the inner psychological world of the speaker. Chomsky himself rejects E-language as having no apparent role in the theory of language, but Saussure’s attitude towards parole is less dismissive. Like Chomsky, he believes that the underlying linguistic system should be the object of study, but Saussure argues that the principles of langue can be discovered through observation of parole, or speech, as it is the externalised form of langue.
A crucial issue that arises from Saussurean notions of language is the place of syntax in linguistic analysis. As discussed above, Saussure considers langue to be the underlying system beneath language that gives meaning to arbitrary linguistic signs, while parole is the executive side of language. In Saussure’s view, sentences do not belong to langue but they are a part of parole, and as such they do not belong to the actual system of language. (Zegarac, 2006) He considers that act of combining words into sentences to be execution, and as such within the domain of parole. Chomsky holds the opposite view, and he argues that sentences and syntax are a part of I-language, as all speakers possess the ability to generate, and also comprehend, novel sentences that have never been uttered before and therefore the mental grammar must contain the principles by which the sentences are formed.
Saussure’s notions of langue, parole and the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign led to the shift in focus from the diachronic to the synchronic study in language. Before Saussure’s time, linguistic investigation was mainly concerned with the development of language through time, but Saussure’s ideas occasioned an inevitable change to studying language without reference to a particular period. As mentioned before, Saussure’s linguistic sign is defined by its relations to other signs within the language system, and therefore it does not have a permanent core but is susceptible to change over time. This means that the language itself undergoes constant change, and as such its study should concentrate on the state of the linguistic signs at a particular time. (Culler, 1976)
There are definite similarities between Chomsky and Saussure’s notions of language. They both attempted to isolate the object of linguistic investigation and came to the conclusion that linguistics as a science should focus on studying the underlying linguistic system beneath language. Where the notions of the two linguists diverge most notably is in the way they understand the concept of language. For Saussure, language is something purely social, an institution that is created by a social contract of sorts between the speakers. Chomsky holds the opposite view, as he argues that language is an innate mental organ, which is an attribute of all humans.
V. Žegarac. 2006. 'Language as an Object of Study'. In the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2ed.), Elsevier.