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According to modern linguistics and its founder Ferdinand De
Saussure, the faculty of language needs to be separated in two
elements: Langue and Parole, considering Langue as a setof signs or
codified conventions (a social system), while Parole is the speech
act, an ensemble of combinations effectively produced through the
code, and thus, an individual psychologicalactivity. This faculty
of language is seen as an innate ability to form codes and to learn
them with
the only purpose of communication and its place is located in
the speakers brain, with thecombination of sound-images and their
correspondent concepts. But even if language is apsychological
process, it has a concrete nature because those signs have an
actual location in thebrain of human beings and are represented
through conventional images. And by means of thisidea, language is
essentially social and external to individuals, a product that is
passivelyregistered; the individual cannot create nor modify
language by itself, it is comparable to a sort of established
contract in a determined community. De Saussure also states that
the scope of Linguistics should be concerned only with the study of
Langue because Parole is a many-sidedmanifestation, with a
heterogeneous behavior and cannot be studied with an objective
point of view, and even syntax is outside of linguistics since
Langue is a system of signs, and does notspecify how those signs
are combined in actual speech, thus syntax would rather belong
to Parole, not to Langue.In the same way in a contemporary time,
Leonard Bloomfield gave a similar argument
saying that linguists must be concentrated on the structure of
language overt behavior, but at thesame time, Bloomfield gave a
different point of view of this idea arguing that we cannot
studybehavior because is not possible to speculate on the
underlying processes out of lack of thenecessary knowledge of
physiology and psychology, so in order to study language
Bloomfield
proposes to eliminate any mental or psychological process,
contrasting with De Saussuresarguments and theory about the
linguistic sign and semantics, and focusing only in the materialand
mechanical aspects of language. With this behaviorist point of
view, Bloomfield reformulatesthe role of semantics in linguistics,
because his notion of language has no place for any kind of
concept or mental image. The only element that can be
demonstrated is the group of stimuli andreactions that are produced
in certain situations.
With this idea, linguistics could only concern itself with the
system; as a consequence,what the linguists had was a divided model
of grammar, in which the system as an activity wasignored, and the
individual activity or knowledge of the social system was
neglected. In 1965,Noam Chomsky argued against these conceptions of
language, proposing that there is a specificknowledge about our own
language, which is not conducted by a general intelligence and
thatis not learnable by means of the production and interpretation
of sentences that require a certainnumber of complex actions, known
as Platos problem. Chomsky infers that there must be aformal
knowledge, previous to experience that allows to a child, for
example, using all kinds of expressions without an explicit
instruction. With this new point of view, he rejects the visions of
behaviorist language, and also sets the idea of a creative aspect
of language, which is expressed
by Descartes problem which points the fact that, with a infinite
group of units and rules, aspeaker can produce an infinite number
of grammatical sentences, and thus, this are interpretablefor the
listeners.
On the other hand, Chomsky inserts a new dichotomy between
competence andperformance, which allowed him to distinguish the
internal system of knowledge from the realand observable linguistic
behavior. Chomsky explic itly assumes that competence is:
Concerned
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primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely
homogeneous speech-community, whoknows its language p erfectly and
is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions ()in
applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance
(Chomsky, 1965, p.3).
In that sense, Chomsky separates competence, which is an
idealized capacity (mental or
psychological), from the real production of utterances, which is
performance. This dichotomyreminds to the distinction between
Langue and Parole from De Saussure, as himself quotes in histheory.
Nevertheless, while for Chomsky competence is the group of
underlying rules frominfinite sentences of a language, for De
Saussure, Langue virtually coincides with vocabulary in asystematic
group of items. But at the same time, even if Chomskys point of
view contributes to anew perspective about how language is
originated in our brain and how we organize it, his idealeads to
the isolation of his theory, which considers itself to be separate
from the rest of thecognitive capacities and studies language at
the individual level as a system, leaving aside thelinguistic
activity as unsystematic. Similarly, the social side of language
and its inherent socialnature are also ignored.
