CORRELATION OF THE LANGUAGE AND SPEECH (CONCEPTUAL DISCUSSIONS)

Анотація

Introduction. General place of Saussure’s concept, which was recognized by almost all specialists, is differentiation within speech activity of two completely different functional semiological structures – invariant system of defiance means (the one called Langue by Ferdinande de Saussure) and actual semiological process of social interaction based on the language (discours), and during this process the language users realize their semiological-communicational needs, which take place during speaking (parole). The editors of “General linguistics course” did not notice these conceptual-terminological specifics and undermined it, bringing the whole process of social interaction down to single volatile acts of individual speakers.

Purpose. The presented research material is to demonstrate the understanding of the language and the speech by F. de Saussure.

Methods. Textual lexical-semantic analysis has been conducted. Analysis of all the usages of the following terms: langue, discourse and parole in the book “On dual existence of language activity”. Also, in reinterpreted generally well-known studies on Saussure’s concept.

Results. Majority of language specialists accept Saussure’s dualism of language activity as given. However they do not interpret the correlation between the both objects the same way. The key point of relationship between the language and the speech (in Saussure’s understanding) is the functional relationship between stable informational system and its usage within the social interaction.

Originality. The results of the research, presented in the article, are drawn together on the basis of the analysis of new, until then unknown to the scientific world, materials found in 1996 in Geneva in the book called “The Double Essence of Language”. New materials have not yet been translated either into the Russian or the Ukrainian languages. During analysis of terms usage of Saussure’s scientific concept we relied on French edition of the 2002 monograph.

Conclusion. The differentiation between dicours and parole is important (even though not the same), but the difference between them is not within the quality but is within the quantity. And it is quite important: discours and parole are the processes, but langue is the static system. The research showed that F. de Saussure clearly distributes the key terms of his concept – langue, discours and parole, out of which the first one concerns the potential aspect of the language activity, and the other two – its actual-process aspect. F. de Saussure does not mix them all, and does not mix them up or uses them as synonyms. The scientist on many occasions stressed out that the language exists only because of the speech (it comes to being and develops during the process of speech interaction) and only exists for speech (is required as an instrument to create such an interaction). At the same time the speech may exist only because of the relationship between the signs and grammatical rules of the language. It is difficult to separate these two only because they are only overlapping functional aspects of language activity.