Langue vs Parole
The final contribution of Saussure that we will discuss this week is the divide between langue and parole, French words that roughly equate to language and speaking. For Saussure, langue, language, is the system of signs that a speech community has agreed upon. It is one homogeneous whole. It exists “outside the individual who can never create nor modify it by himself. It exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community.” Thus, learning a language is a matter of learning all the linguistic signs of the community, which sounds make up the phonemic system, how the sounds are put together into linguistic signs, i.e., being able to relate the sound-images (signifiers) with their appropriate mental concepts (signifieds), and combining these into coherent utterances. This homogeneous system made possible the individual utterance, the execution of the act of speaking, that is, parole. Unlike langue, speaking is always heterogenous, changing with each utterance. The distinction is important because linguistics as a science (according to Saussure) is concerned only with langue, not with parole. (See Course in General Linguistics, pp. 10-15).
Competence vs Performance
Saussure’s division of human speech into langue and parole has had a vast influence on thinking about language and linguistics, and eventually led to a new formulation by Chomsky. Chomsky’s views of language as part of the innate biology of the human mind led him to shift the notion of langue away from an external “social contract” of linguistic signs, to an internal, cognitive recognition of the grammar of language. The term he used for this internal grammatical knowledge is linguistic competence. As a native English speaker, you have an internalized set of finite rules that allow you to comprehend and to create an infinite number of expressions. These rules govern the use of the different structural systems of English–the phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and so on. The actual execution of these rules is the performance, similar to Saussure’s parole. One’s linguistic performance can be affected by fatigue, memory lapse, physical issues, and so on. You may violate any of the rules when you actually speak, and yet this has no bearing on your linguistic competence. Imagine you are having a conversation with your friends, and you are telling them about your day. You know which words to use, you know how to pronounce them, you know the order to put them in, and your friends have no trouble understanding what you are saying. In other words, you have the linguistic competence to produce comprehensible English to describe anything you wish, just as your friends have the competence to understand your use of English. Of course you will probably make a mistake when you are speaking; you might stutter or mispronounce a word, you might need to pause because you momentarily forget the words you are looking for, or you might use the wrong word by accident and have to correct yourself. In spite of what errors appear in your individual performance, your linguistic competence remains. And it is the rules that make up one’s linguistic competence that are the object of study in linguistics.
Descriptive vs Prescriptive Linguistics
Many of us have been taught certain “rules” of English in grammar classes from elementary school up through college: “do not split infinitives,” “do not end a sentence with a preposition,” “two negatives cancel each other out and make a positive,” “i before e except after c,” and so on. These are not rules of English; rather, they are rules of a specific type of standard, formal, written English as decided by certain people who are considered (by some) to be authorities. Most of them were invented as stylistic suggestions in the 18th century, and they have since been passed down as rules for “correct” English. We call them prescriptive because they prescribe, that is, authorize or at least recommend, a certain usage. If you are trying to write formal written English, then it is a good idea to follow these rules, but that does not mean that they are actual rules of English or that the version of English they prescribe is the “correct” or “pure” version.
The true rules of English, those which make up one’s linguistic competence, are discovered by observing how English speakers actually speak, that is, they describe the usage found among English speakers; they are therefore called descriptive rules. Let us start with rules of pronunciation. Consider a word like “rbadn.” As a native speaker of English, you should know immediately that this word cannot exist in English. You know this because it violates a phonological rule of English: we do not use the consonant cluster rb at the beginnings of words in English. It is probable that no one has ever explicitly taught you this rule, but you still know it as part of your competence as an English speaker. When we call this a rule of English, we do not mean it is a rule that we must follow, but rather that it is a rule that all English speakers simply do follow (compare Saussure’s notion of a “social contract” here). If we were to search every single word that exists in English we would not find a single one that begins with the consonant cluster rb. The rule “words cannot begin with ‘rb'” describes a feature of English; tt does not prescribe a feature. If a community of English speakers start using a new word that begins with rb, the rule would change so that it would describe the new reality.
The same types of rules exist for English grammar. “Don’t end sentence with a preposition” is not a descriptive rule of English; we know this because many English speakers frequently end sentences with prepositions. As an example, many native English speakers would feel quite comfortable with a sentence like “What did you do that for?” Therefore, it would be wrong to say that English cannot have prepositions at the end of a sentence.
Acceptability
People sometimes confuse descriptive grammar with an idea that there are no rules of English or that “anything goes.” Observation of English speakers tells us that this is not so and that there are in fact a great many rules of English, and if a speaker violates one of these rules then the utterance is considered ungrammatical. The term we use when evaluating whether an utterance is grammatical or not is acceptability. Any native speaker who hears an utterance makes an immediate judgment whether or not the utterance is acceptable or not. This term keeps us from falling into problems that are associated with more loaded terms like “good” or “bad” or “correct” or “incorrect.” Some utterances are “acceptable” and some are not, based solely on the criterion of whether or not a linguistic community accepts the phrase as meaningful.
The acceptability of an utterance depends entirely on the usage of speakers of the language. In other words, different speakers might have different notions of acceptability. We must therefore make a distinction between what we as individual speakers of a language consider acceptable and what we as students studying language can term acceptable or not. Consider the following three sentences:
A. I do not have any money.
B. I ain’t got no money.
C. Money no I has.
Which of these are acceptable and which are unacceptable? The criterion used to make that determination depends on the person making the judgment, so that you personally might find that only A is acceptable, or only B, or perhaps you find both A and B acceptable. As linguists studying English as a whole, however, we can observe many native speakers of English who would utter either A or B or both. We would not observe any native speakers of English who would utter C. C is therefore “unacceptable” in English grammar because we can find no actual attestations of it in usage among speakers. To denote that an utterance is unattested, and therefore considered unacceptable, we mark it with an asterisk *:
C. *Money no I has.
Some people might say that sentence B is grammatically incorrect but is still acceptable “because it makes sense.” But our judgment of acceptability is based on grammar, not the semantics of the utterance. In his 1957 work Syntactic Structures, Chomsky presented what has become his most famous sentence:
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
This sentence makes no logical sense, and yet it can be judged as grammatically acceptable by all native English speakers. Chomsky contrasted it with the sentence *”Furiously sleep ideas green colorless,” which is unacceptable to a native English speaker. In other words, our notions of what is acceptable in a linguistic performance depends on whether or not the sentence conforms to the internalized rules of linguistic expression, not to whether or not the utterance makes logical sense.
Many students have made the mistake of confusing the notions of “improper” or “colloquial” English with “unacceptable” English. If you look at sentence B above, it may seem thoroughly incorrect to you. You may even think that allowing it to be considered an acceptable utterance is some form of political correctness gone wrong. Such an idea, however, is simply not accurate. Linguistics is a descriptive science, like all other sciences, and thus it seeks to describe language as it is found in the world. It is a linguistic fact that sentence B is a very common construction in English, and therefore it is necessarily a valid English construction. Saying that it is “wrong” would be like a botanist criticizing a flower as an invalid flower because it had five petals when the botanist preferred six petals, or as if an astrophysicist said that a certain star was wrong and should not be allowed to exist because it burned at an improper temperature compared to the sun. These examples are almost too silly to write down here, and yet people complain endlessly about phrases that they hear native English speakers uttering. I emphasize this point only because grammar, or its “misuse,” seems to engender much emotion among some parts of the population. Language is one of the first ways in which we seek to categorize those to whom we speak, or to position ourselves within a certain group or class of speakers. We often judge people as smart or dumb or employable or socially acceptable based solely on their pronunciations or word choices: this person says Nevada with the wrong “a,” that person says “aks” instead of “ask,” this person said “pop” instead of “soda,” and so on…. As linguists, we must judge all these variations as acceptable, simply because we observe them in use among speakers.
