The preceding chapters have shown something of the scope and ambition of Saussure's project. However incomplete it may have been, it initiated a radically new perspective in the study of language, a veritable Copernican revolution. This insisted that the primary study of a language is a synchronic study of it as a system, in which the main aim is to identify the units of the system and the relations among them. Such units are not mere abstractions, but concrete entities which are psychologically real (5.1), so that there is in principle a determinate system to be reconstructed. Moreover, their value is determined by the relations and oppositions that obtain between them and other items of the system rather than by their history or by other extraneous factors. Of course, if this is the primary study, then it is essential that we should be clear about what belongs to the system and what not; hence the importance of the distinctions between langue and parole and between synchrony and diachrony. And since the system has to be described by describing the relations among its elements, which are not identifiable independently of it, the importance of Saussure's account of associative and syntagmatic relations is also clear.

We saw that Saussure rejected the dominant organicist conception of language (1.1). For him, the primary subject matter of linguistics does not consist of linguistic forms developing in accordance with principles applying to forms of that type, like a species.