Structural linguistics - Wikipedia

Created time

Aug 31, 2024 11:42 PM

History

Structural linguistics begins with the posthumous publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics in 1916, which his students compiled from his lectures. The book proved to be highly influential, providing the foundation for both modern linguistics and semiotics. Structuralist linguistics is often thought of as giving rise to independent European and American traditions due to ambiguity in the term. It is most commonly thought that structural linguistics stems from Saussure's writings; but these were rejected by an American school of linguistics based on Wilhelm Wundt's structural psychology.[10]

Key Features

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John E. Joseph identifies several defining features of structuralism that emerged in the decade and a half following World War I:

Systematic Phenomena and Synchronic Dimension: Structural linguistics focuses on studying language as a system (langue) rather than individual utterances (parole), emphasizing the synchronic dimension. Even attempts to study parole often incorporate elements into the sphere of langue.

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Primacy of Langue over Parole: Structuralists believe that the virtual system of langue, despite being indirectly observable and reconstructed through parole, is more fundamental and "real" than actual utterances.

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Priority of Form over Meaning: There is a general priority of linguistic form over meaning, continuing the Neogrammarians' tradition, although some exceptions exist, such as in Firth's work.

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Marginalization of Written Language: Written language is often viewed as a secondary representation of spoken language, though this view varies among different structuralist approaches.

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Connection to Social, Behavioral, or Cognitive Aspects: Structuralists are ready to link the structure of langue to broader phenomena beyond language, including social, behavioral, and psycho-cognitive aspects.

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European structuralism

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In Europe, Saussure influenced: (1) the Geneva School of Albert Sechehaye and Charles Bally, (2) the Prague linguistic circle, (3) the Copenhagen School of Louis Hjelmslev, (4) the Paris School of André Martinet and Algirdas Julien Greimas, and the Dutch school of Simon Dik.[11] Structural linguistics also had an influence on other disciplines of humanities bringing about the movement known as structuralism.

'American structuralism', or American descriptivism

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Some confusion[12][a] is caused by the fact that an American school of linguistics of 1910s through 1950s, which was based on structural psychology, (especially Wilhelm Wundt's Völkerpsychologie); and later on behavioural psychology [13][b] is sometimes nicknamed 'American structuralism'.[14] This framework was not structuralist in the Saussurean sense that it did not consider language as arising from the interaction of meaning and expression. Instead, it was thought that the civilised human mind is organised into binary branching structures. Advocates of this type of structuralism are identified from their use of 'philosophical grammar' with its convention of placing the object, but not the subject, into the verb phrase; whereby the structure is disconnected from semantics in sharp contrast to Saussurean structuralism.[10] This American school is alternatively called distributionalism, 'American descriptivism', or the 'Bloomfieldian' school – or 'post-Bloomfieldian', following the death of its leader Leonard Bloomfield in 1949. Nevertheless, Wundt's ideas had already been imported from Germany to American humanities by Franz Boas before him, influencing linguists such as Edward Sapir.[15]

Bloomfield named his psychological approach descriptive or philosophical–descriptive; as opposed to the historical–comparative study of languages.[16] Structural linguists like Hjelmslev considered his work fragmentary because it eluded a full account of language.[17] The concept of autonomy is also different: while structural linguists consider semiology (the bilateral sign system) separate from physiology, American descriptivists argued for the autonomy of syntax from semantics.[18] All in all, there were unsolvable incompatibilities between the psychological and positivistic orientation of the Bloomfieldian school, and the semiotic orientation of the structuralists proper. In the generative or Chomskyan concept, a purported rejection of 'structuralism' usually refers to Noam Chomsky's opposition to the behaviourism of Bloomfield's 1933 textbook Language; though, coincidentally, he is also opposed to structuralism proper.[19][12]

Basic theories and methods

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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", e.g. a word, is thus the combined association of signifier and signified. The value of a sign can be defined only by being placed in contrast with other signs. This forms the basis of what later became the paradigmatic dimension of semiotic organization (i.e., terms and inventories of terms that stand in opposition to each other). This is contrasted drastically with the idea that linguistic structures can be examined in isolation from meaning, or that the organisation of the conceptual system can exist without a corresponding organisation of the signifying system.

Paradigmatic relations hold among sets of units, 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.

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 English, 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 ("I should") and dois je? ("Should I?") 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 (difference in structural configurations) as indicators of paradigmatic relations (e.g., in the present case: questions vs. assertions).

The most detailed account of the relationship between a paradigmatic organisation of language as a motivator and classifier for syntagmatic configurations was provided by Louis Hjelmslev in his Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, giving rise to formal linguistics. Hjelmslev's model was subsequently incorporated into systemic functional grammar, functional discourse grammar, and Danish functional grammar.

Structural explanation

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Compositional and combinatorial language

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Interaction of meaning and form

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See also: Binary opposition and Markedness

Another way to approach structural explanation is from Saussure's concept of semiology (semiotics). Language is considered as arising from the interaction of form and meaning. Saussure's concept of the bilateral sign (signifier – signified) entails that the conceptual system is distinct from physical reality. For example, the spoken sign 'cat' is an association between the combination of the sounds [k], [æ] and [t] and the concept of a cat, rather than with its referent (an actual cat). Each item in the conceptual inventory is associated with an expression; and these two levels define, organise and restrict each other.[31]

Key concepts of the organisation of the phonemic versus the semantic system are those of opposition and distinctiveness. Each phoneme is distinct from other phonemes of the phonological system of a given language. The concepts of distinctiveness and markedness were successfully used by the Prague Linguistic Circle to explain the phonemic organisation of languages, laying a ground for modern phonology as the study of the sound systems of languages,[12] also borrowing from Wilhelm von Humboldt.[32]

Likewise, each concept is distinct from all others in the conceptual system, and is defined in opposition with other concepts. Louis Hjelmslev laid the foundation of structural semantics with his idea that the content-level of language has a structure analogous to the level of expression.[33] Structural explanation in the sense of how language shapes our understanding of the world has been widely used by the post-structuralists.[34]

Structural linguist Lucien Tesnière, who invented dependency grammar, considered the relationship between meaning and form as conflicting due to a mathematical difference in how syntactic and semantic structure is organised. He used his concept of antinomy between syntax and semantics to elucidate the concept of a language as a solution to the communication problem. From his perspective, the two-dimensional semantic dependency structure is necessarily forced into one-dimensional (linear) form. This causes the meaningful semantic arrangement to break into a largely arbitrary word ordering.[35]

Scientific validity

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Saussure's model of language emergence, the speech circuit, entails that la langue (language itself) is external to the brain and is received via la parole (language usage). While Saussure mostly employed interactive models, the speech circuit suggests that the brain is shaped by language, but language is not shaped by the brain except to the extent that the interactive association of meaning and form occurs ultimately in the brain.

Such ideas roughly correspond to the idea of language that arises from neuroimaging studies. ERP studies have found that language processing is based on the interaction of syntax and semantics rather than on innate grammatical structures.[36][37] MRI studies have found that the child's brain is shaped differently depending on the structural characteristics of their first language.[38] By contrast, research evidence has failed to support the inverse idea that syntactic structures reflect the way the brain naturally prefers to process syntactic structures.[39] It is argued that Functional Grammar, deriving from Saussure, is compatible with the view of language that arises from brain research and from the cross-linguistic study of linguistic structures.[40]

Recent perceptions of structuralism

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Those working in the generativist tradition often regard structuralist approaches as outdated and superseded. For example, Mitchell Marcus writes that structural linguistics was "fundamentally inadequate to process the full range of natural language".[41] Holland[42] writes that Chomsky had "decisively refuted Saussure". Similar views have been expressed by Jan Koster [43] Mark Turner [44] and other advocates of sociobiology.[45][46]

Others however stress the continuing importance of Saussure's thought and structuralist approaches. Gilbert Lazard has dismissed the Chomskyan approach as passé while applauding a return to Saussurean structuralism as the only course by which linguistics can become more scientific.[47] 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 a persistence of the structuralist paradigm.[48]

Effect of structuralist linguistics upon other disciplines

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In the 1950s Saussure's ideas were appropriated by several prominent figures in continental philosophy, anthropology, 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.[49][50]

Modern guidebooks of structural (formal and functional) analysis

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Roland Schäfer, 2016. Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen (2nd ed.). Berlin: Language Science Press. ISBN 978-1-537504-95-7
Emma Pavey, 2010. The Structure of Language: An Introduction to Grammatical Analysis. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780511777929
Kees Hengeveld & Lachlan MacKenzie, 2008. Functional Discourse Grammar: A Typologically-Based Theory of Language Structure. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199278107
M.A.K. Halliday, 2004. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3rd edition, revised by Christian Matthiessen. London: Hodder Arnold.ISBN 978 0 340 76167 0

Notes

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^ Martinet, André (1989). "Linguistique générale, linguistique structurale, linguistique fonctionnelle". La Linguistique. 25 (1): 145–154.
^ Matthews, P. H. (2014). "Structural linguistics". The Concise Dictionary of Linguistics (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780191753060.
^ de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Open Court House.
^ a b c d e f Joseph, John E. (2002). From Whitney to Chomsky: Essays in the History of American Linguistics. John Benjamins. ISBN 9781588113504.
^ Hejl, P. M. (2013). "The importance of the concepts of "organism" and "evolution" in Emile Durkheim's division of social labor and the influence of Herbert Spencer". In Maasen, Sabine; Mendelsohn, E.; Weingart, P. (eds.). Biology as Society, Society as Biology: Metaphors. Springer. pp. 155–191. ISBN 9789401106733.
^ a b c Sériot, Patrick (1999). "The Impact of Czech and Russian Biology on the Linguistic Thought of the Prague Linguistic Circle". In Hajičová; Hoskovec; Leška; Sgall; Skoumalová (eds.). Prague Linguistic Circle Papers, Vol. 3. John Benjamins. pp. 15–24. ISBN 9789027275066.
^ a b Aronoff, Mark (2017). "Darwinism tested by the science of language". In Bowern; Horn; Zanuttini (eds.). On Looking into Words (and Beyond): Structures, Relations, Analyses. SUNY Press. pp. 443–456. ISBN 978-3-946234-92-0. Retrieved 2020-03-03.
^ Saussure, Ferdinand De (1931). Cours de linguistique générale (3e éd.). Paris: Payot. p. 42. Nous pensons que l'étude des phénomènes linguistiques externes est très fructueuse ; mais il est faux de dire que sans eux on ne puisse connaître l'organisme linguistique interne.
^ a b Dosse, François (1997) [First published 1991]. History of Structuralism, Vol.1: The Rising Sign, 1945-1966; translated by Edborah Glassman (PDF). University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-2241-2.
^ a b Seuren, Pieter A. M. (1998). Western linguistics: An historical introduction. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-20891-7.
^ Chapman, Siobhan; Routledge, Christopher, eds. (2005). "Algirdas Greimas". Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language. Oxford University Press. p. 107.
^ a b c Dosse, François (1997) [First published 1992]. History of Structuralism, Vol.2: The Sign Sets, 1967- Present; translated by Edborah Glassman (PDF). University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-2239-6.
^ Seuren, Pieter (2008). "Early formalization tendencies in 20th-century American linguistics". In Auroux, Sylvain (ed.). History of the Language Sciences: An International Handbook on the Evolution of the Study of Language from the Beginnings to the Present. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 2026–2034. ISBN 9783110199826. Retrieved 2020-06-28.
^ Blevins, James P. (2013). "American descriptivism ('structuralism')". In Allan, Keith (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of the History of Linguistics. Oxford University Press. pp. 418–437. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199585847.013.0019. ISBN 978-0199585847.
^ a b Klautke, Egbert (2010). "The mind of the nation: the debate about Völkerpsychologie" (PDF). Central Europe. 8 (1): 1–19. doi:10.1179/174582110X12676382921428. S2CID 14786272. Retrieved 2020-07-08.
^ Bloomfield, Leonard (1933). Language. Holt.
^ a b Hjelmslev, Louis (1969) [First published 1943]. Prolegomena to a Theory of Language. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 0299024709.
^ Anderson, John M. (2005). "Structuralism and autonomy: from Saussure to Chomsky". Historiographia Linguistica. 32 (1): 117–148. doi:10.1075/hl.32.2.06and.
^ Bricmont, Jean; Franck, Julie (2010). Bricmont, Jean; Franck, Julie (eds.). Chomsky Notebook. Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231144759.
^ Plungyan, V. A. (2011). Modern linguistic typology. Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 81(2), 101-113. doi:10.1134/S1019331611020158
^ Cassirer, Ernst A. (1945). "Structuralism in modern linguistics". Word. 1 (2): 99–120. doi:10.1080/00437956.1945.11659249.
^ Turner, James (2015). Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9781306579025.
^ Edles et. Appelrouth, Laura D; Scott (2004). Sociological Theory in the Classical Era:Text and Readings. SAGE publications. p. 107.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^ Daneš, František (1987). "On Prague school functionalism in linguistics". In Dirven, R.; Fried, V. (eds.). Functionalism in Linguistics. John Benjamins. pp. 3–38. ISBN 9789027215246.
^ a b Andersen, Henning (1989). "Markedness theory – the first 150 years". In Tomic, O. M. (ed.). Markedness in synchrony and diachrony. De Gruyter. pp. 11–46. ISBN 978-3-11-086201-0.
^ Darnell, Michael; Moravcsik, Edith A.; Noonan, Michael; Newmeyer, Frederick J.; Wheatley, Kathleen, eds. (1999). Functionalism and Formalism in Linguistics, Vol. 1. John Benjamins. ISBN 9789027298799.
^ Buckland, Warren (2014). "Semiotics of film". In Branigan, Edward; Buckland, Warren (eds.). The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory. Routledge. pp. 425–429. ISBN 9781138849150.
^ Martinet, André (1964). Elements of General Linguistics. Translated by Palmer, Elisabeth. Faber and Faber. ISBN 9780571090792.
^ Hjelmslev, Louis (1971) [1943]. Prolégomènes à une théorie du langage. Paris: Les éditions de minuit. p. 27. ISBN 2707301345. Nous exigeons par exemple de la théorie du langage qu'elle permettre de décrire non contradictoirement et exhaustivement non seulement tel texte français donné, mais aussi tous les textes français existant, et non seulement ceux-ci mais encore tous les textes français possibles et concevables
^ Arnauld, Antoine; Lancelot, Claude (1975) [1660]. The Port-Royal Grammar. Translated by Rieux, Jacques; Rollin, Bernard E. Mouton. ISBN 902793004X.
^ de Saussure, Ferdinand (1959) [First published 1916]. Course in general linguistics (PDF). New York: Philosophy Library. ISBN 9780231157278. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2020-04-14. Retrieved 2020-06-16.
^ Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt; Messling, Markus (2017). "Wilhelm von Humboldt". Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring ed.). Stanford University. Retrieved 2020-08-23.
^ Coșeriu, Eugenio; Geckeler, Horst (1981). Trends in Structural Semantics. Narr Verlag. ISBN 9783878081586.
^ Williams, James (2005). Understanding Poststructuralism. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781844650330.
^ Tesnière, Lucien (1959). Éléments de syntaxe structurale. Klincksieck.
^ Kluender, R.; Kutas, M. (1993). "Subjacency as a processing phenomenon" (PDF). Language and Cognitive Processes. 8 (4): 573–633. doi:10.1080/01690969308407588. Retrieved 2020-02-28.
^ Barkley, C.; Kluender, R.; Kutas, M. (2015). "Referential processing in the human brain: An Event-Related Potential (ERP) study" (PDF). Brain Research. 1629: 143–159. doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2015.09.017. PMID 26456801. S2CID 17053154. Retrieved 2020-02-28.
^ Wei, Xuehu; Adamson, Helyne; Schwendemann, Matthias; Goucha, Tómas; Friederici, Angela D.; Anwander, Alfred (19 February 2023). "Native language differences in the structural connectome of the human brain". NeuroImage. 270 (270): 119955. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2023.119955. PMID 36805092.
^ Koizumi, Masatoshi; Yasugi, Yoshiho; Tamaoka, Katsuo; Kiyama, Sachiko; Kim, Jungho; Ajsivinac Sian, Juan Esteban; García Mátzar, Pedro Oscar (September 2014). "On the (non)universality of the preference for subject-object word order in sentence comprehension: A sentence-processing study in Kaqchikel Maya". Language. 90 (3): 722–736. doi:10.1353/lan.2014.0068. JSTOR 24672044. S2CID 146776347. Retrieved 2023-05-15.
^ Polinsky, Maria; Kluender, Robert (January 2007). "Linguistic typology and theory construction: Common challenges ahead". Linguistic Typology. 11 (1): 273–283. doi:10.1515/LINGTY.2007.022. JSTOR 24672044. S2CID 42025166. Retrieved 2023-05-15.
^ Marcus, Mitchell (1984). "Some Inadequate Theories of Human Language Processing". In Bever, Thomas G.; Carroll, John M.; Miller, Lance A. (eds.). Talking Minds: The Study of Language in Cognitive Science. Cambridge MA: MIT P. pp. 253–277.
^ Holland, Norman N. (1992). The Critical I. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-07650-9.
^ "Saussure, considered the most important linguist of the century in Europe until the 1950s, hardly plays a role in current theoretical thinking about language," Koster, Jan. (1996) "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.
^ Fabb, Nigel (1988). "Saussure and literary theory: from the perspective of linguistics". Critical Quarterly. 30 (2): 58–72. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8705.1988.tb00303.x.
^ Evans, Dylan (2005). "From Lacan to Darwin". In Gottschall, Jonathan; Wilson, David Sloan (eds.). The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. pp. 38–55.
^ Lazard, Gilbert (2012). "The case for pure linguistics". Studies in Language. 36 (2): 241–259. doi:10.1075/sl.36.2.02laz.
^ Matthews, Peter (2001). A Short History of Structural Linguistics. Cambridge Univ. Press.
^ Tallis, Raymond (1995) [First published 1988]. Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory (2nd ed.). Macmillan Press.
^ Tallis, Raymond (1998). Theorrhoea and After. Macmillan.

External links

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