Langue and Parole (Linguistic Antrophology)

Saussure is considered to be responsible for making dichotomy between Langue and Parole. Here, I’m trying to explain these two concepts by reference to Course in General Linguistics.

Ferdinand de Saussure is a linguist who has given much significant influence to the development of Linguistics in the 20th century. As the “father” of Modern Linguistics, he is considered as a linguist who has had a monumental impact on Structuralism theory. Furthermore, Saussure’s idea about general theory of sign system that is semiology. He has five views about language that was being guidance for many linguist, they are signifier and signified, form and content, langue and parole, synchronic and diachronic, and syntagmatic and paradigmatic. However, in this case I would like to proffer only one of his views that are Langue and Parole as the components of language.

Langue
Langue refers to the abstract system of language that is internalized by a given speech community. Langue can be considered as pure referential. In this case, the point of this approach is analyzing internal relation of elements in languages and search for the structure and system of languages without considering external elements of language. Here, structure must have three characteristics that are: (1) consist of units, (2) having an order, and (3) one element precedes the other element. The branches of Pure linguistic that is made by Langue approach are Phonetics and Phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Here, I intend to give the explanation about those branches of language by adding some example in order that we are able to see system and structure in it.

• Phonetics and Phonology: linguistic branch that focus on the phoneme in language.
   Example: Phoneme /b/ vs phoneme /p/ → [pin] vs [bin]
• Morphology
  Example: Cat (plural) → Cat + -s
  The sign Cat and cats are associated in the mind, producing an abstract paradigm of the word forms of cat. Comparing this with other paradigms of word forms, we can note that in the English plural often consist of little more than adding an s to the end of the word.

• Syntax is a linguistic branch that study about the inter relationship between elements of sentence structure, and of the rules governing the arrangement of sentences in sequences.
Example: The cat Climbs the tree (The Cat is a Subject, Climbs is a Verb and The tree is an object)

• Semantics: pure linguistic approach to semantic is to emphasize one of modes significance way that is called pure semantic approach (referential).
Example: a cat chases a mouse. 
- This sentence claimed in proposition that there is an agent “a cat” doing an activity “chases” and the patient is “a mouse” and the proposition must be true if it relevant with reality. 
- To construct the sentence we may follow some process such us selection of the words (system), syntagma (structure) and also concatenation (stretch of words). The sentence constructed by using the convention language which gives a meaning to the sentence. In this case, we select the word “a cat”, “chases” and “a mouse”. These words are appropriate to construct a sentence a cat chases a mouse. Thus, we will consider syntagma in the sentence in which we cannot relate the word “chases” with “flow” or “a mouse” with “flow” because we found no meaning from this relation and it is inappropriate with grammatical structure.

 
Parole
Parole can be considered as individual act of speech and “putting into a practice of language”. Parole is heterogeneous, that is to say composed of unrelated or differing parts of elements. The study of parole would be entirely focused on individual utterances, using all the available resources of formal and empirical study to analyze actual statements, usually within a specific language. It could be reflection of individual freedom in which the speech that created by saying the words in given language. In this sense, de Saussure defines that language as a product, the social side of speech being beyond the control of the speaker. In addition, according to de Saussure, language is not a function of the speaker, but passively assimilated and speaking as defined by Saussure, is premeditated act.