Is it needed to reinterpret the social fact concept in Saussure?

Abstract

Saussure’s ideas published in the CLG produced a discursive event and circulated the discourse which defends that, by excluding speech from the object of study of linguistics, Saussure excluded the social fact from the sciences of language (Meillet, Voloshinov). After 100 years of this publication, we wonder if it is necessary to reinterpret the concept of social fact in Saussure. Our question is based mainly on passages from the CLG that prove how much Saussure was concerned with this issue, when he presented the concepts of speaking mass, the collective character of the linguistic sign, language as a social institution and also because of the influences of authors who dealt with such a subject as Durkheim and Whitney. The purpose of this article is to problematize this discourse, which is made evident by reflecting on the question of social fact in the Swiss linguist. To carry out this research, we collected statements from the CLG and opposed it with criticisms from language scholars, who argue that Saussure made the exclusion of the social fact in the constitution of linguistic science. From this research, we were able to understand that he did not neglect the social fact, on the contrary, when discussing the dependence on the collective contract, Saussure realized that, for systematic relations to work, social ratification was necessary.