The abstract and the concrete in linguistic facts: Speech - discourse - language
Language is not the actual subject of linguistics. Linguistic fact belongs to the category of acts of social communication, but language is not an act, it is a system. Speech is an act, but language in it is associated with non-functional facts that need to be eliminated. When this process of elimination is realized, we get the linguistic fact in its pure state, the discourse. Linguistics is the study of discourse. It seeks to determine the rules of its use, and it is those rules that are the language.