Articles

Integrative-Differential Characteristics of Language and Speech Categories

ABSTRACT

The distinction between language and speech has long been a central issue in linguistics. At the beginning of the 19th century, the prominent German philosopher of language, Wilhelm von Humboldt, first approached this issue systematically and scientifically argued that language and speech are categories with different essences. Some time later, the Swiss scientist Ferdinand de Saussure laid the foundation for a new stage in the field of general linguistics and explained the relationship between language and speech with scientific precision. Language is abstract, while speech is a concrete and individual phenomenon. Speech is always manifested either in written or oral form and, since it has the character of a process, can be observed and heard. Language, on the other hand, has a kind of abstract nature because it is abstract; we can understand it only because it causes speech to arise. The language-speech dichotomy put forward by Saussure was analyzed in later periods, and since the middle of the 20th century, the prominent American linguist Noam Chomsky brought an analytical approach to this issue. This view was considered a structuralist linguistic approach. N. Chomsky, applying an anthropocentric approach to language-speech relations, identified common and specific features between different languages ​​and thinking.

KEYWORDS

language, speech, integrative-differential characteristics