Descriptive Vs.

Prescriptive
Before Saussure, linguistics was part of philology ("love of learning"). The philological tradition
focused on classical languages and canonical texts and was often prescriptivist in its goals.
Prescriptive linguistics seeks to develop, systematize and enforce a language standard. A "standard" is
the dialect of any language that is held up as the correct version, the one that should be spoken.
Other dialects are usually treated as variations from the standard, which is understood to be the
"real" language.
Descriptive linguistics treats language as a symbolic system through which people communicate. It
seeks to describe the systems that actually exist rather than to correct them. Through accurate
description we strive to gain a better understanding of how language works in human
communities.
Synchronic vs. Diachronic
In addition to separating his approach from the prescriptivist mode of analysis, Saussure also sought to
distinguish his approach from that of historical linguistics. Historical linguistics is diachronic, "across
time." It seeks to show where languages came from, how they are related and how they have changed
over time.
While historically important, such research is not necessarily important in the study of meaning, which
Saussure wanted to emphasize. Where a word came from is not important for understanding its
meaning. The fact that "beef" is an Anglicization of a Middle French word that entered into English
after the Norman conquest is completely unnecessary for understanding its use in contemporary
speech. Saussure argued instead for a linguistics that was synchronic "with time." This form of
linguistics would describe languages as they work in contemporary life.
Langue vs. Parole
The object of linguistics, Saussure argued, must be language (langue) and not speech (parole).
Language, for Saussure, is the symbolic system through which we communicate. Speech refers to
actual utterances. Since we can communicate an infinite number of utterances, it is the system behind
them that is important.
Saussure illustrated this with reference to a chess game. The chess game has its rules and its pieces
and its board. These define the game. Actual games of chess are only interesting to the participants.
Thus in linguistics, while we may collect our data from actual instances of speech but the goal is to
work back to the system of rules and words that organizes speech.
Social fact
This understanding of speech treats it as a "social fact." The concept of a social fact was derived from
the work of the great French social theorist Emil Durkheim. Language is a social fact because:
It pre-exists us. We learn language through our socialization experience. We use language as part of
our daily life but we do not invent it.
It post-exists us. The language we speak will continue to be spoken in much the same ways after we
are gone. Its existence does not depend on us as individuals.
It has more power over us that we have over it. The language system sets constraints on us. We can
have little, if any, control over how language changes while we are living speakers of it.

This view of language says it is not the sum of individual speakers and their utterances. Rather, it is
the rules and the layout and the tokens that we can use to produce a bounded but infinite set of
utterances.
Signifier vs. Signified
The tokens of chess are its pieces; the tokens of language are signs.
A sign is something that stands for something else. A sign thus consists of two components: a signifier
and a signified. In the case of words, the signifier is a particular sound and the signifier is the concept it
stands for.

Concept
Saussure is very careful to emphasize that words do not refer to things in the world but to ideas we
have about the world. The word "tree" does not refer to the thing in the world but rather to a concept
we have in our heads. Linking these concepts to the real world involves particular kinds of language
work. One uses deictic markers like "this" or "that" to relate concepts to objects in the world.
Arbitrariness
Saussure also emphasizes that the relations between signifier and signified are arbitrary, that they are
based on social convention and not any natural or essential link. "Tree," "baum," "shagarah" and
"arbor" can all stand for roughly the same concept because there is nothing about any of these sounds
that is more treelike than any other.
The semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce argued that not all relations of significations are completely
arbitrary. He suggested three kinds of sign relations:
Indexical
Indexical signs have a relationship of continuity or causality with the signified. When Robinson
Crusoe sees Friday's footprint in the sand it signals to him "another human" because only a human foot
can leave a human footprint (unless we postulate intentional fraud). Likewise, smoke signifies fire
because fire produces smoke.
Iconicity
Iconic signs are connected by resemblance. Some words are coined to resemble the concepts they
signify. "Tick-tock" stands for the sound of a clock because it is supposed to sound like the sound of a
clock. In literary contexts, this is called onomatopoeia. Although it has only restricted use in English,
some languages, like Korean and Japanese, have large iconic vocabularies.
Symbolic
Peirce reserved the word symbol for signs that were strictly conventional. However, a number of
linguists and semioticians, notably Umberto Eco (1976) have argued that even iconic and indexical
signs are ultimately symbolic and arbitrary. Certainly in language there are no pure indexical signs; a
grunt of pain is indexical but it is not a word. To articulate our pain we need symbols. Likewise,
resemblance depends upon social conventions. "Bow-wow," "arf" and "woah" are all supposed to
resemble a dog's bark yet the arrangement of phonemes is arbitrary and conventional.
Syntagmatic vs. Paradigmatic

SIGN
Syntagmatic vs. Paradigmatic
Language is made up of signs. Saussure calls it a system of signs. But how are we to describe the
systemic part of language?

Saussure argued that languages are doubly articulated semiotic systems. That is, languages are able
to carry meaning because they are organized at every level by two sets of rules, syntagmatic and
paradigmatic. At the phonological level, for example, paradigmatic relations determine what sounds
out of the total stream of possible sounds are meaningful for a given language, while syntagmatic rules
determine how sounds can combined to create meanings. Both of these systems are arbitrary that is,
there is no necessary or natural connection between any set of sounds and its meaning. In natural
languages, one set of these rules is called a grammar. Most people cannot articulate the grammar of
their own language they just speak it. But linguists working with small discrete bits of language
words and sentences can extract and describe the rules behind them.
Syntagm
Syntagmatic relations are relations of signification organized in time and space. paradigm is a set of
signs, and a syntagm is a new sign that has been constructed by combining the signs in the paradigm
under the guidance of a code. For example, an alphabet is a set of signs, a paradigm. Any word or other
meaningful text constructed from them is a syntagm. There is nothing free about how syntagms are
formed; they are never just randomly thrown together, but are constructed using certain rules. In
English , at the morphological level, the sound /b/ at the beginning of a word can be followed by only a
small set of other morphemes: vowels, /l/, /r/ or /y/. It is impossible that /b/ should follow /t/ in a
normal word. In Arabic, it is impossible that there should be three consonants in a row without a vowel
to break them up. These kinds of rules constitute a syntagmatic structure. A collection of syntagms
formed from one paradigm can themselves in turn become a paradigm. This happens in languages. In
English and Arabic, the alphabet is the paradigm from which the syntagms of words are formed. In
turn, the respective sets of English and Arabic words become the paradigm from which English and
Arabic sentences are formed. We describe this ability when we call a semiotic system doublyarticulated.
Paradigm
But if syntagmatic structures arrange elements in meaningful relations in time and space, there is the
important question of where these elements come from in the first place. Signs carry meanings apart
from their relations to one another in time and space. Part of this meaning derives from reference.
Signs refer to things in the world or, more accurately, to ideas about things in the world which is why
there can be signs that refer to imaginary things like flying carpets or unicorns. The words sheep and

mouton both refer to the same animal. But this is not all there is to the meaning of these words.
According to Saussure, we produce meaning not only by linking signs together in time and space, but
also by doing something which is outside that temporal sequence: we choose a sign from a whole
range of alternative signs. Saussure calls this kind of meaning the value (valeur) of a sign. The
French mouton may have the same referential meaning as the English sheep, but it does not have the
same value. The reason is that English has the terms mutton and sheep, a distinction which is not
available in French. Saussure emphasizes that a sign gains its value from its relation to other signs.
When a journalist writes: A leading Iraqi official today denounced the U.Ns arms inspection
commission
she chooses each sign from a range of alternatives. She could also have written:
Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz condemned
A top Hussein aide reviled
Iraq refused to cooperate with
When we look at such a range of possibilities, we are examining the paradigmatic relationship between
signs. A paradigm is a set of interchangeable possibilities, each of which has a value quite different
from other members of the same paradigm. The value of a sign and its referential meaning are not
unrelated. At the most primary level of language, the phonetic, the meaning of sounds derives from
their binary oppositions, their distinctions from one another along some axis. Neither /s/ nor /z/ has a
referential meaning. The meaning of the sounds is derived from their similarity and difference from
one another; the s/z distinction is one of unvocalized/vocalized. Once youve discovered such a feature
(vocalization) you will discover that many other sounds in the language depend on the same
characteristic.