A socio-pragmatic comparative study of

2.1. Structuralism 
The changes that have occurred in linguistic theory have resulted in the emergence of 

---

CHAPTER TWO: REVIEW OF THE RELATED LITERATURE 
13
sociolinguistics. From among the early approaches to the study of language, the most 
systematic and elaborated one is the so-called structuralism. It developed out of 
Saussure's (1916) concept of "langue" as the subject matter of linguistics. He divided 
language into "langue" and "parole." According to Saussure, la langue is localized in 
the "limited segment of the speaking circuit where an auditory image (s) becomes 
associated with a concept (c)." La langue is the "social side of language, outside the 
individual who can never create or modify it by himself; it exists only by virtue of a sort 
of contract signed by the members of a community" (Kristeva, 1989: 9). In other words, 
la langue exists perfectly only within a collectivity. La parole (i.e. speech) is always 
"individual, and the individual is always its matter" (Kristeva, 1989: 9). Speech is, 
according to Saussure's definition, an individual, willful, and intelligent act. It is 
composed of (1) the combination by which the speaker uses la langue's code; and (2) 
the psychophysical mechanism that allows him to externalize these combinations.
With such a view of language, structuralism considered it necessary to bother with the 
study of actual speech in social interactions. On the basis of the linguistic intuitions of a 
few informants, structuralist found it fruitful to analyze the homogeneous, abstract, and 
invariant rules of language. In structuralism, the aim of linguistics is the elaboration of 
context-free grammatical rules that account for that part of linguistic behavior which is 
uniform and homogeneous. Structuralists, therefore, viewed language variation as some 
unimportant deviations from the norm.