ABSTRACT
The study of language has taken two forms. First, there has been a massive development of synchronic linguistics whose particular object of knowledge is language's own laws of operation. It makes possible the reflection on speech as a 'language', a specific system with its own laws of functioning. Scientific knowledge of language has also been extended to all social practices which can then be studied as languages, as for example with structural anthropology. This second development is based on the assumption that all social practices can be understood as meanings, as signification and as circuits of exchange between subjects, and therefore can lean on linguistics as a model for the elaboration of their systematic reality.
