Although it is often said that Merleau-Ponty took from Saussure's theory of language what he wanted in order to confirm his phenomenology, it should also be said that he highlighted two Saussurian principles which would come to be the focus of structuralist theories of language and semiotics. These are that meaning in language arises through a diacritical relationship between signs, and that a diachronical study of language cannot explain the nature of current usage. What the phenomenologist finds in the structural linguist is a theory which seems to emphasize the subject's lived relation to the world. Again, Merleau-Ponty writes that Saussure's notion of the primacy of the synchronic dimension of language for understanding the nature of language as such, 'liberates history from historicism and makes a new conception of reason possible'. To view language synchronically, Merleau-Ponty argues, is to view it as enacted, and not as an abstract, universal entity, subject to gradual evolution over time.
Language here is fundamentally the 'living present' in speech.
Indeed, any discourse on language must come to grasp itself as an enactment of language. A linguistics worthy of the name, therefore, comes to recognize that language can only be understood from the inside. In other words, language can no more be reduced to a history of linguistics than history can be reduced to historical discourse. Furthermore, in focusing almost exclusively on the level of parole as the embodiment of language, the phenomenologist is unable to explain satisfactorily how a move can be made from the individual 'I speak', to the fact that another speaks. This issue is but the tip of the iceberg.