The Saussurean Dichotomies

1) The Saussurean dichotomies
The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is known as the father of modern linguistics. After his death some of his students reconstructed the course in linguisticsthat he had taught in Geneva.
In the course, Saussure made a number of fundamental distinctions which are still basic to linguistic thinking, these are explained below.

Langue versus ParoleSaussure says there are two sides to language: langue and parole. In English they are translated as “language and speech”.
Langue is that part of Language which is not complete in any individual, butexists only in the collectivity.
Parole, on the other hand is observable in the behavior of the individual.
Saussure believes that linguistics is fundamentally the study of langue. Had corpuslinguistics been a concept with which Saussure was familiar, he would no doubt have dismissed it as dealing with parole rather than with langue.
The distinction between langue and parole has suffered two majorchanges in subsequent scholarship. First, a third level has been added, that of the NORM. Our langue would allow us to say what we want to say in any different way. We do not find such utterancesattested in parole. This cannot be related to vagaries of parole, because it is extremely homogeneous within relevant speech communities. Neither can it be a matter of langue, because langue allows usto say the same thing in many different ways. It is a matter of norm. Different dialects may give different norms. There are also varieties of English.
The second thing that has happened to thelangue/parole distinction is that it has been overtaken by other similar distinctions. Chomsky introduces the distinction between competence and performance.
PERFORMANCE is very like Saussure’s parole.It is prone to error, to memory lapse and the like.
COMPETENCE it is a mental construct in the individual. Saussure concedes that langue is something which exists in each individual and is common...