LINGUISTICS

INSTITUTO SUPERIOR DEL TRADUCTORADO

SET MATERIAL FOR UNIT 1

Dirección General de Cultura y Educación de la Provincia de Buenos Aires – DIEGEP 5649

THE MEANING OF LANGUAGE

Extract from: Modern English Structure by B M H Strang, Professor of English Language and General
Linguistics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. (Middle 20th cent.)

STRUCTURALLY, language is an articulated system of signs, primarily realised in the medium

of speech. We shall spend the next few paragraphs considering what this means. It is a
system, not a mere collection of parts, because in any given language the functioning parts
hang together and condition each other. We can see this most clearly if we go outside our own
language and compare its conventions with those of other languages. In vocabulary, for
instance, the semantic spread or functional range of Modern English sheep is limited by the
co-presence of mutton in the language, as contrasted with that of, say, mouton in French; the
semantic spread of Swedish farmor (paternal grandmother) is limited by the presence of
mormor (maternal grandmother) in the same vocabulary, as contrasted with that of English
grandmother. Each unit is delimited by its neighbours, and therefore all are ultimately
interdependent —like the English parochial system in which the borders are all mutually
determined and no interstices are left over. The same features can be observed in the
organisation of grammar: for instance in Modern English, which has no pronoun dual, the
plural is used with reference to, or in connection with, more than one, but in Old English, which
had, the plural was used in connection with more than two. A comparable type of mutual
conditioning can be observed in the elements of the sound system; and again in the
relationships between the various component systems of a language —the question of just
what is expressed by means of vocabulary and what by means of grammar in a given
language, for instance (consider how you would render Cosi fan tutte into English). By taking
examples outside English I have tried to bring out aspects of English structure that might
otherwise be overlooked; I do not mean to suggest that all languages somehow or other cover
the same ground semantically, for this is not the case. The total semantic coverage of a
language depends on the total experience of the speech-community using that language, and
experience differs from community to community. When we compare languages, therefore,
there are always some similar and some distinctive ranges of meaning expressed.
The kind of system language is, is an articulated system. The word articulated is
ultimately derived from Latin articulus, diminutive of artus "joint", and it is here used to refer to
the property in languages of being able to build up units of one order into units of another
order, that is, not merely something bigger, but something functioning in quite a different way
from its component parts (compare the difference between single vertebrae and the backbone
they compose. In English, for example, the two words but and bit are each made up of three
sounds in a given order; the difference between them is made by the middle sound. Now the
difference of sound between u and i does not have any significance in itself (see how differently
it functions in other paired sequences like hut, hit; fun, fin; sun, sin), but these sounds are the
means of making a distinction between two units of a different order from themselves (namely,
words). You will notice that at this level the articulations are almost wholly governed by
convention; we acquire whole words when we learn our mother tongue, and if we want to be
understood we do not form too many new ones for ourselves. But words themselves can be
articulated into units of another, more complex order, usually called sentences,
and this is where an element of personal creativeness enters into our utterances. If we know
a language we can always articulate from its words (if it has words) sentences we have never
heard before, and we can count on their being understood by speakers to whom, likewise,
they are new.

INSTITUTO SUPERIOR DEL TRADUCTORADO – Calle 6 No. 843 (48 y 49) – TRADUCTORADO OFICIAL 1
 SET MATERIAL FOR UNIT 1 cont.

Extract from: A Short History of Linguistics by R H Robins, Professor of General Linguistics at London
University, UK. (Middle 20th cent.)

SIGNIFICANTLY, the key figure in the change from nineteenth- to twentieth-century attitudes
was the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who first made himself known to scholarship
through an important contribution to Indo-European comparative linguistics. Though he
published little himself, de Saussure's lectures on linguistics in the early twentieth century so
impressed his pupils in Geneva that in 1916 they published his Cours de linguistique générale
as far as they could reconstruct it from their own and others' lecture notes and such materials
as survived in de Saussure's hand. In the history of linguistics, de Saussure is largely known
and studied through what his pupils recollected of him. [...]
Historically, de Saussure's ideas may be put under three heads. Firstly, he formalized
and made explicit, what earlier linguists had either assumed or ignored, the two fundamental
and indispensable dimensions of linguistic study: synchronic, in which languages are treated
as self-contained systems of communication at any particular time, and diachronic, in which
the changes to which languages are subject in the course of time are treated historically. It
was de Saussure's achievement to distinguish these two dimensions or axes of linguistics,
synchronic or descriptive, and diachronic or historical, as each involving its own methods and
principles and each essential in any adequate course of linguistic study or linguistic instruction
(a point that might perhaps be heeded by some latter-day descriptivists).
Secondly, he distinguished the linguistic competence of the speaker and the actual
phenomena or data of linguistics (utterances), as langue and parole (like so many others,
these Saussurean terms have passed untranslated into international currency). While parole
constitutes the immediately accessible data, the linguist's proper object is the langue of each
community, the lexicon, grammar, and phonology implanted in each individual by his
upbringing in society and on the basis of which he speaks and understands his language.
Much influenced by the sociological theory of Emile Durkheim, de Saussure perhaps
exaggerated the suprapersonal reality of langue over and above the individual, more
especially as he recognized that changes in langue proceed from changes made by individuals
in their parole, while he yet declared that langue is not subject to the individual's power of
change.
Thirdly, de Saussure showed that any langue must be envisaged and described
synchronically as a system of interrelated elements, lexical, grammatical, and phonological,
and not as an aggregate of self-sufficient entities (which he compared to a mere
nomenclature). Linguistic terms are to be defined relatively to each other, not absolutely. This
is the theory expressed in his statement that a langue is forme, non substance, and illustrated
with his well-known metaphors of chessmen and trains, identified and known by their place in
the whole system, of the game or the railway network, and not by their actual substantial
composition. In a language these interrelations lie on each of the two fundamental dimensions
of synchronic linguistic structure, syntagmatic, in line with the succession of utterance, and
paradigmatic (associative), in systems of contrastive elements or categories.

Suggested reading: Course in General Linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure.

Enter the topic name in the Knowledge Base search box at the Campus to read it. [You may wish to focus on
‘Introduction’, Chapters III to VI, and ‘General Principles’ (Part I).]

INSTITUTO SUPERIOR DEL TRADUCTORADO – Calle 6 No. 843 (48 y 49) – TRADUCTORADO OFICIAL 2