![]() ![]() For the structuralist, of course, langue is the proper object of study parole is of interest only in that it reveals langue. In order to differentiate between the structure that governs language and the millions of individual utterances that are its surface phenomena, Saussure called the structure of language langue (the French word for language), and he called the individual utterances that occur when we speak parole (the French word for speech). It looks for the rules that underlie language and govern how it functions: it looks for the structure. Structuralism doesn’t look for the causes or origins of language (or of any other phenomenon). Saussure realized that we need to understand language, not as a collection of individual words with individual histories but as a structural system of relationships among words as they are used at a given point in time, or synchronically. ![]() Before Saussure, language was studied in terms of the history of changes in individual words over time, or diachronically, and it was assumed that words somehow imitated the objects for which they stood. ![]() Structural linguistics was developed by Ferdinand de Saussure between 19, although his work wasn’t translated into English and popularized until the late 1950s. ![]()
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