Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :Course in General Linguistics
"But what is language [langue]? It is not to be confused with human speech…Taken as a whole, speech is many-sided and heterogeneous; straddling several areas simultaneously - physical, physiological and psychological—it belongs both to the individual and to society; we cannot put it into any category of human facts, for we cannot discover its unity.
Language, on the contrary, is a self-contained whole and a principle of classification. As soon as we give language first place among the facts of speech, we introduce a natural order into a mass that lends itself to no other classification."
Language (langue) is not the same thing as speech (parole). Speech is very varied. 1,000 different individuals can say 1,000 different things. One person talks about going to the movies and another about his idol Ferdinand de Saussure. Two folks say "pop," but one is talking about soda and the other is calling her dad. These speech acts are are all different, so on the surface we can't find unity between them.
Language, on the other hand, is a logical system that we can use to classify speech. It underlies all speech. Even though those 1,000 things sound different on the surface, they are all governed by language rules that are logical and consistent. If we focus on langue, we can find the order and logic that governs that mass of different speech acts.
Let's look at it another way. When we say "I like pop," that's an utterance, a "parole." There can be any number of variations of this parole: "we played table tennis," "I prefer Mission Impossible," "I study structuralism." But even though all these paroles are different, beneath every one is the same grammatical structure: subject-verb-object. The grammatical structure that underlies all of these sentences is the "langue," whereas the various utterances are "paroles."
The paroles may be different, but the structure beneath them is the same. The same goes for other grammatical structures, but the point is that various forms of parole, no matter what aspect of a person's life or cultural surroundings they're referring to, are based in the same set of linguistic rules.
Basically, Saussure is making a distinction that is central to structuralism: On the surface of language, there are differences. But beneath those superficial differences there is a common structure. Sound familiar?
Quote :Course in General Linguistics
"[I]n language there are only differences…Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it."
It's the differences between words, between sounds, and between meanings that count in language. It's not the words, sounds or meanings in themselves that matter.
In other words: A is A because it's not B. We understand concepts, just like letters, based on what they're not. We understand the word "loud" because we understand its opposite, "quiet." Just like we understand what "human" means because we know that that's different from "machine." Language makes sense only through the differences and contrasts (binary oppositions) that it sets up. These differences and contrasts are the structure out of which meanings are made.
Now this is another very important idea of Saussure's that was big for later structuralists, especially the ones who adopted these theories in other disciplines. It's a pretty radical idea because it suggests that meaning doesn't exist before differences. That is, without contrasts and binary oppositions in language, we wouldn't have meanings.
Quote :Course in General Linguistics
"A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable….I shall call it semiology (from Greek semeion, 'sign'). Semiology would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them. Since the science does not yet exist, no one can say what it would be; but it has a right to existence, a place started out in advance. Linguistics is only a part of the general science of semiology."
There goes Saussure, making up parallel universes again. But semiology actually did become a whole new field of science, even though at this point it hadn't been officially invented yet.
According to Saussure's daydreams, that new scientific field would take the study of signs as its subject. He didn't just mean linguistic signs here (letters and words), but really any kind of sign. How do the clothes we choose to wear signal to others? How does body language work? Traffic lights? All these different sign systems would form part of the science of semiology, or the science of the study of signs. Linguistics would be just one branch of this science.
Saussure is imagining a whole new science by suggesting that structuralist ideas can be applied beyond the field of linguistics. Other scholars and theorists followed up on Saussure's fantasies and applied a structuralist perspective to phenomena in all sorts of cultural and social fields.
The fact that Saussure is claiming that language and signs can be studied scientifically is also pretty clutch here. For the first time, someone's saying that social and cultural aspects of life can be studied with the same rigor and objectivity as that of scientists who examine natural phenomena. Watch out, physics, biology and chemistry. Semiology is about to break into reality!