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outdated and as superseded by developments such as cognitive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