Page 149 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

LANGUE

accounts suggest three; others suggest as many as seven. A more recent
approach known as speech act theory focuses more specifically on
stipulating in detail a precise range of actions which discrete utterances
are capable of performing.

See also: Speech act

Further reading: Halliday (1973); Jakobson (1960)

LANGUE

In Saussurian linguistics, the abstract system of signs and conventions
underlying individual acts of speaking. The role of langue, therefore,
may be seen as analogous to that of the musical score that underlies
individual performances of a symphony or the rules of chess that
make possible an unlimited variety of actual games. The symphony,
for instance, exists independently of its individual performances – in
which false notes may occur, distinctive choices of tempo may be
adopted, and so on. Likewise, chess may be played with many
different sequences of moves, on many sizes of board, with different
kinds of pieces, and yet remain chess as long as the basic rules of the
game are observed. In the same way, for English or Swahili or
Gujarati, there is a common storehouse of basic, necessary
conventions or rules which speakers of that language follow when
framing their utterances. It is these conventions that constitute the
langue for that language; and it is by following such shared
conventions that intelligibility is guaranteed between speakers of that
language. In this sense, langue is very much a social product shared
between members of a social body as a whole and out of the control
of any one individual.
As with so many important terms in modern linguistics, the notion
of langue was developed initially in the work of the Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure. For him, contrasting langue with parole was
an important methodological step in isolating the object of linguistic
enquiry by focusing on the institution (langue) rather than the event
(parole). The distinction is similarly formulated in much modern
linguistics, whether as competence versus performance in the work of
Chomsky – or potential linguistic behaviour versus actual linguistic
behaviour in the work of Halliday. In structuralism and in
semiotics the notion of langue was extended to embrace other
kinds of the sign than the purely linguistic one. Thus, patterns of

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