The Social and the Individual in Language

• Published in: Language and speech 1959-10, Vol.2 (4), p.193-204
• Main Authors: Leontiev, Alexis N., Leontiev, Alexis A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0023-8309; 1756-6053
• DOI: 10.1177/002383095900200403

The behaviourist view of language, which reduces it to a system of stimuli and responses, is too limited, since it leaves out of account the function of apprehension (prise de conscience). Language embodying socially accumulated and generalised experience reflects the phenomena of the surrounding world in the human mind in the form of consciousness. Thus, consciousness is a form of reflection which is social by nature. It is inconceivable without the mastery of language. At the same time “speech capacity”, i.e. the mastery of language, is determined by inborn psycho-physiological mechanisms common to all human beings. The relation between language as a social and a psychological phenomenon is dynamic, revealing itself in mutual transformations. Individual language is not an “imprint” of the objective system, as F. de Saussure believed it to be, but a product of its active reconstruction. To analyse this relation it is necessary to investigate the process of transformation of the objective phenomena of social language into individual, and that of the transformation of individual-psychological formations into phenomena of social consciousness. The process of mastery of language is important because the only real existence of language not only as a form of individual consciousness but also as a form of social consciousness is its existence in the minds of real individuals. These transformations are due to the fact that the laws which govern the phenomena change just as the laws change when phenomena studied by one science are transformed into phenomena studied by another.