In Part 1 we saw how to pull the shared system (langue) out of the heterogeneous whole of speech (langage); that a sign is a “concept + sound-image”; that the bond between them is arbitrary and linear; and that language is “fixed, yet changing.”
Part 2 is about how that system works, and how it changes.
Synchrony and diachrony: do not mix the two views
There are two ways of looking at language in time.
- Synchrony (synchronie): the relations, at one moment, between words that are in use together. For the speaker, history is irrelevant. It is a way of seeing “the language now” as one picture.
- Diachrony (diachronie): change itself, from one period to the next.
Saussure insists: do not mix these. Looking at the Alps from a single peak is synchrony. Moving from peak to peak and recording how the view shifts is diachrony. Both matter; they are different jobs.
Earlier linguistics, Saussure diagnosed, leaned too far toward diachrony (historical comparison) and neglected a proper description of “the system now.”
Value: a word’s meaning is fixed by its difference from its neighbours
This is the heart of the lectures. First, separate signification from value.
- Signification: what the word stands for (“a sheep”).
- Value: the place the word holds in the system through its difference from the other words.
The coin analogy. A five-cent coin’s value depends on both (1) that it can be exchanged for something different (bread) and (2) that it can be compared with something of the same kind (a one-cent or ten-cent coin). A word is the same: (1) it exchanges for an idea, and (2) it stands in opposition to other words.
Example: mouton and sheep. French mouton and English sheep stand for roughly the same thing, but they do not have the same value. English has a second word, mutton, for the meat on the plate, so sheep covers a narrower range. French covers the whole range with one word.
Number, tense and aspect likewise carve things up differently in different languages and do not simply correspond. So there is no finished concept sitting before the word. A concept arises out of the system, as “what the others are not.”
The sound side works the same way. What matters is that a sound differs from the others. You can roll the Japanese “r” and still be understood (in English, confusing l and r gives a different word). A phoneme works not through its own substance but through its difference from the rest.
The famous formula: in language there are only differences, with no positive terms. Yet the sign taken as a set — concept plus sound — does exist as a positive fact.
Syntagmatic and associative relations: two ways words connect
- Syntagmatic relations: the links a word forms with the ones before and after it in a sentence — “the / dog / runs.” They are actually present, side by side (in praesentia).
- Associative relations: the words that link up in memory as a “family” without being spoken — run → walk, jump, swim, stop, or ran, runs. They are not present (in absentia).
When we speak, we use both at once to pick the one word we need out of the system. Choosing marchons “let’s walk” means subtracting, without noticing, its difference from marche / marchez and from montons / mangeons.
Mechanism: arbitrariness is only “partly” reined in
If every word were arbitrary on its own, learning and using them would be a burden. In fact some words are built so that “the reason shows.”
French vingt “twenty” has no visible reason. But dix-neuf “nineteen” shows its build — dix (10) + neuf (9): it is relatively motivated. poirier “pear tree” is poire + -ier.
Associative and syntagmatic links bring order to arbitrariness. A language that leans on unmotivated words is more “lexicological”; one that builds words from parts is more “grammatical.”
How it changes (inside diachrony)
- Sound change is regular and “blind.” It works on sounds alone, ignoring meaning and the system.
- Analogy builds a new form on the model of an existing relation. Latin honos → honor is the result of solving the proportion orator : oratorem = honos(em) : x. Here is the interesting part: this is creation, not change. The new form does not immediately kill the old one; the two coexist for a while (the old form fading is a separate event). Analogy is grammatical, presupposes that the speaker grasps a relation between forms, and happens first in parole.
- Also treated: folk etymology (a misread origin reshapes a word) and agglutination (several words fuse into one).
Language and land: the real cause of diversity is time
Differences between dialects and languages look like a matter of distance, but Saussure says the cause is time, not space. When one language is carried to a new place, change piles up independently in both places. That is what produces the difference.
Two forces operate: provincialism (esprit de clocher) — keeping the local way, which splits — and intercourse — the movement of people, which spreads and unifies.
A new form spreads out from its starting point like a ripple on water — the wave model.
Looking backward: reconstructing a parent language
Diachrony has two directions: forward (following documents) and backward (inferring an earlier form by comparison). The original form of a single isolated word cannot be recovered, but line up several words of common origin and you can build a common prototype (Proto-Indo-European, say) by induction. It is a historical science, like geology.
A caution: language does not coincide with race or ethnicity. Treating a language as “an organism with its own law of evolution” is a mistake.
In sum: what this book changed
The task is simple. Pull langue out of the mass of speech facts, and describe it — synchronically first — as an autonomous system of differences and oppositions.
The sentence that closes the book: the true and unique object of linguistics is langue considered in and for itself.
This view — arbitrariness, value as difference, the primacy of synchrony, the langue/parole distinction — became the starting point for twentieth-century structuralism, semiotics, anthropology, literary theory and philosophy.