As the previous chapter closed by noting, roughly half a century after Humboldt’s thesis that “language is an activity,” the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure deliberately shuts that “activity” out of his field of study.
Langue vs. parole — putting “activity” outside
Saussure begins by splitting what “language” refers to into three (article 008): parole, the individual, one-off act of speaking; langage, the general human capacity shared by all; and langue, the social system of conventions shared by a community. Only langue — Saussure declares — is the proper object of linguistics.
What Humboldt saw as language’s true substance — the act of speaking, which is essentially parole — gets pushed outside the field here, on the grounds that individual variation makes it unfit for systematic study. Discard energeia (activity), keep only langue as ergon (product) — at first glance, this looks like a retreat back to the Aristotle and Port-Royal camp. But the system Saussure actually finds inside langue looks nothing like what either of them imagined.
Arbitrariness, rebuilt as a first principle
Saussure takes the axiom inherited almost unquestioned since Aristotle — that language works by convention — and grounds it properly, restoring it to the status of a first principle.
The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. … The linguistic sign is arbitrary.
(Japanese and English renderings of quotations throughout are ToL’s own.) With a caveat: “arbitrary” doesn’t mean “freely chosen by the speaker.” What Saussure means is “unmotivated” (immotivé) — there is no reason connecting a sign’s form to its meaning. No individual can unilaterally change a sign; it is imposed on each speaker by the community (article 020). What Aristotle had set down as an axiom, left almost unexamined for over two thousand years, Saussure digs up and rebuilds here as the very foundation of linguistics as a discipline.
There is no “thing” to begin with
But where Saussure’s system decisively breaks from Aristotle’s and Port-Royal’s is what comes next.
In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms.
Aristotle’s sign carried, beneath its arbitrary form (the sound), a positive content — a concept shared by everyone (Chapter 1). Port-Royal’s parts of speech were the trace of a positive content — the mind’s three operations (Chapter 2). Saussure’s system has no such positive content at all. A word’s value is determined purely by how it differs from every other word. “Sheep” means what it does only because it’s a different word from “mutton,” carving a boundary that French’s mouton simply doesn’t draw (article 022).
Saussure brings one more cut to the discipline: distinguishing sharply between the synchronic view of a language frozen at a single moment and the diachronic view of its change through time. That distinction alone lets linguistics stop being merely a discipline that traces word-histories (as nineteenth-century historical and comparative linguistics had been) and become, for the first time, a discipline that describes a system in its own right (article 021).
What was carried forward, and what was reversed
What Saussure kept was Aristotle’s axiom (arbitrariness) and the very posture of treating language as a system. What he reversed was the system’s content. Aristotle and Port-Royal each placed a positive substance — a concept, a mental operation — behind the sign. Saussure places no substance there at all: only a web of relations, of difference from everything else. In holding that there is no “thing” waiting to be named in the first place, Saussure restructures the whole sign-model handed down since Aristotle.
And by pushing “activity” (parole) — the thing Humboldt prized — outside the field, Saussure’s system also pushes individual variation, and the actual scenes where language gets used, out of view. That exclusion draws objections from two directions. One comes from an anthropologist across the Atlantic, trying to put language back inside culture, history, and human variation (Chapter 5). The other comes, later in the twentieth century, from philosophers who locate a word’s meaning not in a dictionary-like system but in the living scene of its use (Chapter 6).