1 SAUSSURE : LANGUAGE AS A SOCIAL FACT

By the end of the nineteenth century – It seemed that  everything looked  good at the time, and some still remain cogent today- the eqution of the languags with biology had largely been abandoned. This created a difficulty of understanding the languag e as an academic discipline: If the language is not the living species, in what  sense are they “thing” can be studied? The man n the street is quite happily that French as something which can be learned, which possesses certain attributes and in some cases, it is same or similar to English but in other cases, it is different; but if  French is a thing , it is a very odd thing....