Saussure: language as social fact

Now we are going to focus in one specific scholar, Ferdinand de Saussure: 

First who is he?

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics. He was born in Geneva.

Language as a social fact:

By the end of the 19th century, the equation of languages with biological species had largely been abandoned. This created a difficulty for the notion of linguistics as an academic discipline.

Although it was not typically felt to be problematic by linguists of the nineteenth century, the question: "How does it make sense to postulate entities called "language" or “dialects” underlying the tangible reality of particular utterances?" in fact remained open during that period.

The man who aswered this was Saussure and he was 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. 

And the in 1913 he died.

Two of his colleagues, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye decided to reconstruct lecture-notes that Saussure had left behind: the book they produced, the "Cours de linguistique générale". And in this document he is recognized as the father of twentieth-century. 

According to Saussure there is an essentially systematic character to the synchronic facts of a language which he claims to be lacking in diachrony.

 Saussure’s concept of an état de langue as a network of relationships in which the value of each element ultimately depends, directly or indirectly, on the value of every other.

A language comprises a set of "signs"each sign being the union of a significant with a signifié.

According to Saussure, the changes which actually occur in the history of a language are in no way dependent on the effect they will have on the system.

A language, according to Saussure, is an example of the kind of entity which certain sociologists call “social facts”.

In Saussure’s view of syntax he worried of two terms: parole (speaking) and langue (language). The parole produced by individual speakers meanwhile the langue is a collectivity.

Saussure argued that langue must be a social fact on the grounds that no individual knows his mother-tongue completely.

And we are concerned in language, so let continue exploring it.