Saussure's Levels of Language

CORE DEFINITION

Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished langue, the shared abstract system of rules and differences that constitutes a language, from parole, the concrete acts of speech by which individuals use it. Within the system, a sign unites a signifier, the sound pattern, with a signified, the concept, and the relation between them is arbitrary and sustained by convention, so meaning arises from differences among signs rather than from reference to things. The core proposition is that a system of rules and its instances must be analyzed separately, and that the system exists only in and through use. The key qualification is that the distinction is analytic, since neither level exists independently of the other.