[opening]
Saussure has been criticized by generations of sociolinguists (Hymes 1974; Goodwin) for not paying systematic attention to the processes of speaking with others. He repeatedly placed the speaking of actual sentences outside of linguistics. It has never been clear to me however whether the objection is about an oversight, understandable given the time of the writing, or whether it is a fundamental challenge of Saussure's understanding of language as a system of factual constraints operating independently of personal mechanisms (even if those are active at any particular moment).

Note that I am specifically not concerned with what Mead suggested were the psychological implications of participating in patterned conversations of gestures, that is the "internalization of the position of the other" as it was extensively developed in many intellectual traditions in the United States.

I take the concern with speaking here as addressing the issue of language in action or, more exactly, language in conversation. To this extent we should start with G.H. Mead and his analysis of the "conversation of gesture" as a tri-partite establishment of meaning in a social field.

[example]
{a graduate classroom during the 'question and answer' period}

Student to Professor:
"Could you give us an example of what Saussure meant when he talked about 'syntagmatic relationships'?

Professor to Student
"

[opening] Too little attention is paid to Saussure's discussion of syntagmatic relationships (p. 122 ff.). And yet this is the bias through which time (and, in principle, interaction) enters structure. Indeed a focus on the syntagm reveals that structure requires time. [example] THE CAT ATE THE MOUSE [coda] In the production or reception of this sentence the whole (gestalt, meaning) is revealed in time. The gestalt is not available as such until all the pieces are in their place (thus the possibility of misfires, jokes, poetry, etc.).

 

Student to Professor
"Thank you."

[coda]
The status of the professor's response as, indeed, "an example" is in the hands of the student who asks, and, in a third step accepts practically the professor's statement as an example. In this sense meaning is an collective act, "joint accomplishment" of all those assembled and making the field. Meaning is not "in the head" of any of the participants. It is then easy to find instances when there are public disagreements about the meaning of an event, that is how to identify it for future action. One can then move to talk of meaning as being 'constructed', 'negotiated' and thus not given by any pre-existing organization of the setting (unless one collapses back into a mentalistic understanding of the need for "shared" codes if 'negotiations' are to proceed smoothly).

[but (toward a new opening)]
Interestingly, however, the most powerful voices in conversational analysis (the field that has arisen to pay systematic attention to speaking) have emphasized the structuring of multi-party conversational exchanges