Structural linguistics is an approach to
linguistics originating from the work of
Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and
is part of the overall approach of
structuralism. De Saussure's Course in
General Linguistics, published
posthumously in 1916, stressed examining
language as a static system of
interconnected units. He is thus known
as a father of modern linguistics for
bringing about the shift from diachronic
to synchronic analysis, as well as for
introducing several basic dimensions of
semiotic analysis that are still
important today, such as syntagmatic and
paradigmatic analysis.
Structural linguistics involves
collecting a corpus of utterances and
then attempting to classify all of the
elements of the corpus at their
different linguistic levels: the
phonemes, morphemes, lexical categories,
noun phrases, verb phrases, and sentence
types. Two of Saussure's key methods
were syntagmatic and paradigmatic
analysis, which define units
syntactically and lexically,
respectively, according to their
contrast with the other units in the
system.
Structural linguistics is now regarded
by some professional linguists as
outdated and as superseded by
developments such as cognitive
linguistics and generative grammar; Jan
Koster states, "Saussure, considered the
most important linguist of the century
in Europe until the 1950s, hardly plays
a role in current theoretical thinking
about language," while cognitive
linguist Mark Turner reports that many
of Saussure's concepts were "wrong on a
grand scale" and Norman N. Holland notes
that "Saussure's views are not held, so
far as I know, by modern linguists, only
by literary critics, Lacanians, and the
occasional philosopher;" others have
made similar observations.
History
Structural linguistics begins with the
posthumous publication of Ferdinand de
Saussure's Course in General Linguistics
in 1916, which was compiled from
lectures by his students. The book
proved to be highly influential,
providing the foundation for both modern
linguistics and semiotics.
After Saussure, the history of
structural linguistics branches off in
two directions. First, in America,
linguist Leonard Bloomfield's reading of
Saussure's course proved influential,
bringing about the Bloomfieldean phase
in American linguistics that lasted from
the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s.
Bloomfield "bracketed" all questions of
semantics and meaning as largely
unanswerable, and encouraged a
mechanistic approach to linguistics. The
paradigm of Bloomfieldean linguistics in
American linguistics was replaced by the
paradigm of generative grammar with the
publication of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic
Structures in 1957.
Second, in Europe, Saussure influenced
the Prague School of Roman Jakobson and
Nikolai Trubetzkoy, whose work would
prove hugely influential, particularly
concerning phonology, and the School of
Louis Hjelmslev. Structural linguistics
also had an influence on other
disciplines in Europe, including
anthropology, psychoanalysis and
Marxism, bringing about the movement
known as structuralism.
Linguists who published articles on
structuralism include: Leonard
Bloomfield, Charles F. Hockett, John
Lyons, R. H. Robins, Otto Jespersen,
Émile Benveniste, Edward Sapir, André
Martinet, Thomas Givon, F. R. Palmer,
Ferenc Klefer, Robert D. Van Valin,
Louis Hjelmslev, and Ariel
Shisha-Halevy.
Basic theories and methods
The foundation of structural linguistics
is a sign, which in turn has two
components: a "signified" is an idea or
concept, while the "signifier" is a
means of expressing the signified. The
"sign" is thus the combined association
of signifier and signified. Signs can be
defined only by being placed in contrast
with other signs, which forms the basis
of what later became the paradigmatic
dimension of semiotic organization. This
idea contrasted drastically with the
idea that signs can be examined in
isolation from a language and stressed
Saussure's point that linguistics must
treat language synchronically.
Paradigmatic relations hold among sets
of units that exist in the mind, such as
the set distinguished phonologically by
variation in their initial sound cat,
bat, hat, mat, fat, or the
morphologically distinguished set ran,
run, running. The units of a set must
have something in common with one
another, but they must contrast too,
otherwise they could not be
distinguished from each other and would
collapse into a single unit, which could
not constitute a set on its own, since a
set always consists of more than one
unit. Syntagmatic relations, in
contrast, are concerned with how units,
once selected from their paradigmatic
sets of oppositions, are 'chained'
together into structural wholes. These
dimensions, still fundamental to all
linguistic and semiotic organisation,
are often confused with other, related
but quite distinct dimensions of
organisation. Prominent examples of this
are the confusion of paradigmatic with
spatial relationships, and syntagmatic
with temporal relations. For the latter,
for example, the fact that in spoken
language syntagmatic units come 'one
after the other' is misread as a
temporal relationship rather than the
abstract structural relationship that it
actually is. Thus, in written language,
syntagmatic units are organised by
spatial sequentiality and not by
temporal sequentiality. These
conflations can be quite pernicious and
need to be watched for carefully when
reading texts purporting to use
Saussurean or semiotic methods.
One further common confusion here is
that syntagmatic relations, assumed to
occur in time, are anchored in speech
and are considered either diachronic or
are part of parole, or both. Both
paradigmatic and syntagmatic
organizations belong to the abstract
system of language langue. Different
linguistic theories place different
weight on the study of these dimensions:
all structural and generative accounts,
for example, pursue primarily
characterisations of the syntagmatic
dimension of the language system, while
functional approaches, such as systemic
linguistics, focus on the paradigmatic.
Both dimensions need to be appropriately
included, however.
Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations
provide the structural linguist with a
tool for categorization for phonology,
morphology and syntax. Take morphology,
for example. The signs cat and cats are
associated in the mind, producing an
abstract paradigm of the word forms of
cat. Comparing this with other paradigms
of word forms, we can note that in the
English language the plural often
consists of little more than adding an S
to the end of the word. Likewise,
through paradigmatic and syntagmatic
analysis, we can discover the syntax of
sentences. For instance, contrasting the
syntagma je dois and dois je? allows us
to realize that in French we only have
to invert the units to turn a statement
into a question. We thus take
syntagmatic evidence as indicators of
paradigmatic relations. The most
detailed account of the relationship
between a paradigmatic organisation of
language as a motivator and classifier
for syntagmatic configurations is that
set out in the systemic-network
organization of systemic functional
grammar, where paradigmatic relations
and syntagmatic configurations each have
their own separate formalisation,
related by realization constraints.
Modern linguistic formalisms that work
in terms of lattices of linguistic
signs, such as Head-driven phrase
structure grammar, similarly begin to
separate out an explicit level of
paradigmatic organization.
Saussure developed structural
linguistics, with its idealized vision
of language, partly because he was aware
that it was impossible in his time to
fully understand how the human brain and
mind created and related to language:
Saussure set out to model language in
purely linguistic terms, free of
psychology, sociology, or anthropology.
That is, Saussure was trying precisely
not to say what goes on in your or my
mind when we understand a word or make
up a sentence. [...] Saussure was trying
to de-psychologize linguistics.
Recent reception
Linguist Noam Chomsky maintained that
structural linguistics was efficient for
phonology and morphology, because both
have a finite number of units that the
linguist can collect. However, he did
not believe structural linguistics was
sufficient for syntax, reasoning that an
infinite number of sentences could be
uttered, rendering a complete collection
impossible. Instead, he proposed the job
of the linguist was to create a small
set of rules that could generate all the
sentences of a language, and nothing but
those sentences. Chomsky's critiques led
him to found generative grammar.
One of Chomsky's key objections to
structural linguistics was its
inadequacy in explaining complex and/or
ambiguous sentences. As Searle writes:
..."John is easy to please" and "John is
eager to please" look as if they had
exactly the same grammatical structure.
Each is a sequence of
noun-copula-adjective-infinitive verb.
But in spite of this surface similarity
the grammar of the two is quite
different. In the first sentence, though
it is not apparent from the surface word
order, "John" functions as the direct
object of the verb to please; the
sentence means: it is easy for someone
to please John. Whereas in the second
"John" functions as the subject of the
verb to please; the sentence means: John
is eager that he please someone. That
this is a difference in the syntax of
the sentences comes out clearly in the
fact that English allows us to form the
noun phrase "John's eagerness to please"
out of the second, but not "John's
easiness to please" out of the first.
There is no easy or natural way to
account for these facts within
structuralist assumptions.
By the latter half of the 20th century,
many of Saussure's ideas were under
heavy criticism. In 1972, Chomsky
described structural linguistics as an
"impoverished and thoroughly inadequate
conception of language," while in 1984,
Mitchell Marcus declared that structural
linguistics was "fundamentally
inadequate to process the full range of
natural language [and furthermore was]
held by no current researchers, to my
knowledge." Holland writes that it was
widely accepted that Chomsky had
"decisively refuted Saussure. [...] Much
of Chomsky's work is not accepted by
other linguists [and] I am not claiming
that Chomsky is right, only that Chomsky
has proven that Saussure is wrong.
Linguists who reject Chomsky claim to be
going beyond Chomsky, or they cling to
phrase-structure grammars. They are not
turning back to Saussure."
Holland's pessimistic view of Saussure's
influence in contemporary linguistics is
not universally agreed to. In 2012,
Gilbert Lazard dismissed the Chomskyean
approach as passé while applauding a
return to Saussurrean structuralism as
the only course by which linguistics can
become more scientific. Matthews notes
the existence of many "linguists who are
structuralists by many of the
definitions that have been proposed, but
who would themselves vigorously deny
that they are anything of the kind",
suggesting the structuralist paradigm
may never have really disappeared at
all. Few linguists reject entirely the
structuralist picture of language as a
hierarchical system of abstractions with
distinct distributional rules and
research programs.
In the 1950s Saussure's ideas were
appropriated by several prominent
figures in continental philosophy, and
from there were borrowed in literary
theory, where they are used to interpret
novels and other texts. However, several
critics have charged that Saussure's
ideas have been misunderstood or
deliberately distorted by continental
philosophers and literary theorists and
are certainly not directly applicable to
the textual level, which Saussure
himself would have firmly placed within
parole and so not amenable to his
theoretical constructs. For example,
Searle maintains that, in developing his
deconstruction method, Jacques Derrida
altered one of Saussure's key concepts:
"The correct claim that the elements of
the language only function as elements
because of the differences they have
from one another is converted into the
false claim that the elements [...] are
"constituted on" the traces of these
other elements."
References
^ Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in
General Linguistics, Open Court House.
^ a b John R. Searle, "Chomsky's
Revolution in Linguistics", New York
Review of Books, June 29, 1972.
^ Koster, Jan. "Saussure meets the
brain", in R. Jonkers, E. Kaan, J. K.
Wiegel, eds., Language and Cognition 5.
Yearbook 1992 of the Research Group for
Linguistic Theory and Knowledge
Representation of the University of
Groningen, Groningen, pp. 115-120.
^ Turner, Mark. 1987. Death is the
Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor,
Criticism. University of Chicago Press,
p. 6.
^ a b c Holland, Norman N. The Critical
I, Columbia University Press, ISBN ISBN
0-231-07650-9
^ Fabb, Nigel. Saussure and literary
theory: from the perspective of
linguistics. Critical Quarterly, Volume
30, Issue 2, pages 58–72, June 1988.
^ Evans, Dylan. "From Lacan to Darwin",
in The Literary Animal: Evolution and
the Nature of Narrative, eds. Jonathan
Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson,
Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
2005, pp.38-55.
^ Chomsky's Revolution in Linguistics
^ Chomsky, Noam. Language and Mind.
Enlarged Ed. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, p. 20
^ Marcus, Mitchell, "Some Inadequate
Theories of Human Language Processing."
Talking Minds: The Study of Language in
Cognitive Science. Eds. Thomas G. Bever,
John M. Carroll, and Lance A. Miller.
Cambridge MA: MIT P, 1984. 253-77.
^ Gilbert Lazard. "The case for pure
linguistics." Studies in Language 36:2,
241–259. doi 10.1075/sl.36.2.02laz
^ Matthews, Peter. A Short History of
Structural Linguistics, Cambridge Univ.
Press, 2001.
^ Tallis, Raymond. Not Saussure: A
Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary
Theory, Macmillan Press 1988, 2nd ed.
1995.
^ Tallis, Raymond. Theorrhoea and After,
Macmillan, 1998.
^ Searle, John R. "Word Turned Upside
Down." New York Review of Books, Volume
30, Number 16· October 27, 1983.
External links
The Structuralist Era
