Speech and writing

Abstract

Abstract In his Cours de linguistique generale, Saussure said: “language is form, not substance”. The meaning of this extraordinarily happy formulation is, of course, that the language, “la langue” as distinct from “la parole”, is something apart from the substance in which it is manifested, an abstract system which is not defined by the substance, but which, on the contrary, forms the substance and defines it as such. Saussure himself did not live to draw the full theoretical consequences of his discovery, and it is a curious fact that it is only now, over twenty years later, that anyone at all has even begun to do this. It is even more curious when we consider that the practical consequences have been widely drawn, indeed had been drawn thousands of years before Saussure, for it is only through the concept of a difference between form and substance that we can explain the possibility of speech and writing existing at the same time as expressions of one and the same language. If either of these two subst...