ABSTRACT
Modern linguistics began in the early twentieth century with the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. The British scholar John Catford opened his book a Linguistic Theory of Translation with the words: 'Clearly, any theory of translation must draw upon a theory of language, a general linguistic theory'. For linguistics to make progress in describing the systems, Saussure thought it necessary to distinguish between what he called 'langue' and 'parole'. The langue/parole distinction is a very high-level distinction, concerning as it does the entire language. One of Saussure's key claims is that the link between the signifier and the signified is not given by some Supreme Being or by Nature, as many nonlinguists believe, but by society. The chain-and-choice model also found in two other branches of linguistics that are closer to a linguistics of parole than of langue, although they can still be analyzed in terms of the Saussurean concepts of signifier/signified and paradigm/syntagm.
