Chapter II
SAUSSURE: LANGUAGE AS A SOCIAL FACT By the end of the nineteenth century, apparently everything look good for the time, and some still remain convincing for the present - the equation of languages with biology has been widely rejected. It creates a difficulty for understanding language as an academic discipline: If the languages are not living species. In what sense are they "things" that can be investigated? A layman happily to French as something that can be learned, which has specific devices and in some same or similar cases for the English but differs from it in others; but if the French is an item which is something strange. It obviously is not a concrete object like a table or even like the stretch of terrain called France. You cannot see or hear the France. You can hear Gaston as the waiter saying “pas si bete …””; you can see a line of print in a newspaper “Le Monde”; but how can we define a form is called French that is behind thousands of a phenomenon concre