Langue vs Parole

Dichotomy between langue and parole

-          Langue:

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) had his own concept of language that distinguished between langue and parole. Langue is the whole system of sign which is a product and convention of society and functioning as communication tool among its member of society. It is abstract because its system of language is in the mind of speaker in a certain social group. The object of linguistics is none other than langue. It can be said that langue is language system shared by a community of speakers. It is both a social product of the faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty.

The abstract langue is an entity existing outside the individual’s mind in a community, called social fact. It can be defined social facts as “ideas (representations) in the ‘collective mind’ of a society”. It is known by every member of a community, and acted on, but they are not consciously known, they are not explicit knowledge. This notion can equally be used for language, which is valid in one community, used by the community’s members, but is not explicitly known or written down in its entirety.

-          Parole:

Differs from langue, parole is wider than langue because it is a concrete realization of the abstract langue. Parole is seen as the actual use of language, e.g. an actual speech act, whereas if we want to study langue we have to look at parole because it is the concrete realization of the abstract langue which is not a physical phenomenon. Language has many variations and used by different kinds of people; men, woman, young, old, farmer, student etc, for the different purpose. Therefore, the manifestation or the use is actually different among them, it is known as parole. They may have a same language but they have their own style or way in utter it.

Parole is the individual component, the activity of speech which belongs to the speaker. The evidence of stylistic choice is to be found in parole, language is not to be found in an individual`s speech it is to be found in all collectivity instead, we cannot describe language if we do not know any speaker`s language as language is differently known by speakers.

2.      Konsep-konsep budaya yang terdapat dalam komponen langue and parole

-          Langue                       :

a.       Culture as distinct from nature: in this case language is that something learned, transmitted, passed down from one generation to the next. It can be said as langue because language is seen as repetitive pattern that has its own rules.

b.      Culture as knowledge: If we talk about culture it closely relates to knowledge of the world and the society itself. It is because culture is a part of life that is created by the human society by studying. It includes their ability to identify objects, places, people, and also ideas or the ways of thinking this world. In the cultural view, language becomes a set of propositions about what the society knows

-          Parole :

a.      Culture as communication                     : In daily life, we find that culture as communication through social actors. Because of culture is the product of society in certain area, so it becomes a tool to connect them with the others, then the communication can be applied.

b.      Culture as a system of mediation           : it seems that culture is a mediating activity between people and the world they inhibit. The instrumental view of language implies the theory of language allows us to conceptualize and reflect upon events while giving us the means to exchange ideas with others.

c.       Culture as a system of practices : culture is a habitual activity that undergone by people in their daily life. This habitual is already shared in the community.

d.      Culture as a system of participation      : language is used in the real world because to speak a language means to be able to participate in interactions with a world that is always larger than individual speaker.

e.       Predicting and interpreting                    : it seems that by culture or language that used by the speaker we can predict human behavior and also we can interpret his utterance.

3.      Kerangka teori yang digunakan dalam menyelesaikan dichotomy antara langue and parole.

Speech is meaningful social behavior. It is language that speaks of the function of sign, their modes of signification, distinguishing from among the types of sign functions shifter or indexes. The meaning of this functional sign mode always involves some aspect of the context in which the sign occurs. To say of social behavior that it is meaningful implies necessarily that it is communicative, that the behavior is a complex of sign that signal, or stand for, something in some respect. Such behavioral signs are significant to some persons, participants in a communicative event, and such behavior is purposive, that is, goal oriented in the sense of accomplishing certain ends of communication. In general, we can say that people are constituted as a society with a certain culture to the extent that they share the same means of social communication.

Language as a system of communication has the same characteristics as the rest of culture. So in order to distinguish analytic subparts of culture, such a language, we have traditionally distinguished among types of communicative events on the basis of the signaling medium. In the case of language, the signaling medium is articulate speech, and events can be isolated on this basis.

Speech Events: the speech event takes place with the participants in given positions and over a certain span of time. The roles of speaker and hearer may be taken by different individuals during the course of such an events. The simplest speech events would be those which themselves constituted the entire goal-directed social behavior.

Semantics and Linguistic Analysis: semantic is the study of the meaning of the linguistic sign. It is the study of pure referential meaning, embodied in propositions coded by speech. This property of speech, abstract reference or description, can be called semanticity. All grammatical analysis of the traditional sort depends on this semanticity.

Metasemantic : metasemantic speech events are the basis of all grammatical analysis and description. It is a natural occurrence in every day speech, a culturally glossing words for children by using grammatically complex but semantically equivalent expressions. The property of language that makes semantic analysis possible is the one that is unique to language and upon which rests the speech function of pure reference. It makes language unique among all the cultural codes for social communication