Talk:Ferdinand de Saussure
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Chomsky tersely claims that, for Saussure, language is a "social product". Is there a simple answer to the question of what this might mean? This article and Structuralism are currently not of much help. --Ryguasu 02:20 Apr 3, 2003 (UTC)
This is absolutely true, and may be contrasted with Chomsky's claim that language is the exclusive product of the speaker's linguistic competence in the individual mind, or in other words, Chomsky's claim that language is a psychological product. For de Saussure, langue (the psychological ability to convert concepts to acoustic images, or for simplicity's sake, words) cannot exist without a kind of general agreement in a community as to what mental concept goes with what form of expression, and how those mental concepts are formulated linguistically. So, in comparision with Chomsky's exclusivly psychological "competence," de Saussure's "langue" includes both the psychological operations of expression, and the community's tacit agreement on how to express certain mental concepts. -- User: Joell
I don't know much about Saussure, but some of the statements here seem to smack of POV:
- It is surprisingly poorly recognized that ...
- and has since then been presupposed by all linguistic science, try as Chomsky might to disavow it.
- Their lack of linguistic expertise (and subsequent misunderstanding of Saussure) and the inappropriate character of their objects of analysis led to theoretical difficulties, eventually causing proclamations of the "death" of structuralism in those disciplines. Unfortunately, this state of affairs persists.
On the last part, it seems that to say unequivocally that Barthes, Lacan, etc. misunderstood Saussure and that this was responsible for proclamations against structuralism would to be know their minds, which is POV unless very well substantiated. And at any rate, it is not Wikipedia's place to say that this misunderstanding is 'unfortunate'. --Saforrest 20:25, May 26, 2005 (UTC)
Uh yeah. "Says who" and also "why did they say it". And the sniggering at Chomsky would be better replaced by his actual objections, or deleted. For Christ's sake. - Echeneida
At this point the article appears perfectly NPOV to me. Why isn't the warning removed?
Here is a note about possibly reconciling Saussure and Chomsky. My recollection is that Chomsky sees the fact that all languages are just that--language--implies that there is something they all must have in common. He sees the thing in common as the "deep structure" of all language. And furthermore, that deep structure is part of the human psychological heritage--that is, it's within the genome--and is the same for all people of all continents. Every language that exists builds, in some different way, on that deep structure. The reasons for their differences have to be looked at historically. I think Chomsky was interested in grammatical structures that languages have in common and was not inclined to look at matters of phonology or what words sound like from language to language. Wasn't Saussure very interested in phonology?
The point of contact between Chomsky's approach and Saussure's, I expect, would be the binary oppositions implicit in Chomsky's ideas of deep structure and those which Saussure saw as essential. It would take a linguist to really comment on this, though. --Aperey 17:12, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
