Glossary

• État de langue or ‘language-state’: to have no extension along the time dimension.

• Historical linguistics: a relatively simple, even beguiling affair of describing one isolated event after another.

• Synchronic description: is a much more serious and difficult occupation, since here there can be no question of presenting isolated anecdotes.

• Signs: represented by the divisions marked off by dotted lines, and each sign being the union of a significant with a signifié.

• Signifiant: a signifier or portion of speech-sound.

• Signifié: a signified or portion of meaning.

• Historical sound-changes: intrinsically independent of systems that can occur when the dropping consonants in word-final position, dropping word-final labiodentals fricatives and dropping word-final alveolar fricatives.

• Language: an example of the kind of entity which certain sociologists call ‘social facts’. Exists perfectly only within a collectivity.

• Parole: speaking.

• Langue: the general system ‘language’. In syntax, it is a social fact  that no individual knows his mother-tongue completely.

• Syntagmatic relations: the ways that linguistic units can be combined into longer constructions.

• Paradigmatic relations: the relationships between elements that can substitute for one another in same ‘slot’ in a linguistic structure.