ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how heavily the speech communication is indebted to the cultural paradigms of a particular phase in Western civilization. The speech communication analysed the purposes of modern linguistic theory, and derived from the more sophisticated modalities represented by the 'proxy' and 'telecommunication' types. Saussure's speech circuit is essentially a diagrammatic representation of a philosophical theory about something else assumed to be achieved through speech. In a word, the circuit is precisely what the terminology of Saussurean linguistics suggests it is: a static model. When linguistic theory came under the influence of behaviourist psychology in the US, the speech circuit model was not so much discarded as re-labelled. What is instructive about the model is the exemplification of how linguistic theory is moulded by the preoccupations and assumptions predominant in the civilization of which it is a product.
