Structuralism

This term is usually used to describe the tradition of Wundt, de Saussure and Bloomfield in linguistics (though it is also sometimes extended to Chomsky's linguistics).

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), Psychophysicist who in the early 1900s was interested in the mental processes of language production (Psycholinguistics). Wundt believed that language was not a set of utterances but consisted of the underlying rules or principles which made it possible for speakers to produce an unlimited number of such utterances. He considered the sentence as the primary unit of language. Speech production was the transformation of complete thought processes into sequentially organized speech segments. Recall from sec. that Wundt invented the tree diagram of syntax. Note later the continuity of generative linguistics with Wundt and de Saussure.

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1953) - Swiss linguist - Cours de Linguistique Générale was compiled out of lecture notes by his students and published in 1916.

De Saussure had earlier been part of the movement that that launched the investigation of the Asiatic origins of European languages (see sec. ). Later he challenged the methodological assuptions of orthodox German philology (eg. that languages close to the original are ``superior'', or that structural similarity implies borrowing or common origin).

• Study of the structure of languages in current use: synchronic as contrasted with diachronic linguistics. De Saussure denied structure in the latter.

• La langue est un système où tout se tient.: language is a carefully built structure of interwoven elements, amenable to systematic, precise and objective study. (Note - contemporary with Gestalt psychology)

• De Saussure likened the language system to a game of chess:
  • The state of the board is changing constantly, yet each state is fully describable in terms of the current position of the pieces, without reference to their prior history.

  • As in chess the actual size and shape of a linguistic token is irrelevant - by mutual agreement any sound can stand for a given concept.

  • Each piece is defined by its relationship to all the others. The meaning of any component of a language is significant in terms of other components and of the specific ones that it happens to be juxtaposed with.

  • Introduction of a new word has reverberations across all other words in the utterance, text or the entire language.

• Study of how words are formed and how they are used together to form larger stuctures; analyse words in terms of morphemes and phonemes (``boats'' has two morphemes: /bot/ with 3 phonemes and /s/ with 1 phoneme). Sentences were analysed in terms of tree diagrams.

• Distinction between la langue (language - an abstract system of patterns and regularities) and le parole (speech - actual utterances, like moves in a particular game of chess, or a particular performance of a piece of music) - a parrot may speak without understanding, but a person who knows the language may choose not to speak.

• De Saussure rejected the positivist conception of language as one of simple correspondence of words to objects in the physical world; instead he saw meaning arising from the relation of the signifier to the thing signified. ``Semiotics'', the study of signs and signification, was developed further by Roman Jacobson, Charles Morris and Roland Barthes (in literary criticism), and was soon adopted into anthropology and sociology.

  see intro at http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/Saussure.html

• De Saussure laid the basis for a new approach not just to linguistics, but to anthropology and sociology as well.

De Saussure's approach was taken up, criticised and reformulated by the Soviet school - Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895-1975) with Valentin N. Volosinov and P.N. Medvedev. They liked de Saussure's attention to the social interaction in language, but felt that he overemphasised the formalised ``dead'' code of proper usage. The Soviet school emphasised the fluidity of the vernacular dialogue or ``dialogic character of language'' heteroglot meanings reacting upon one another - Bakhtin.

Contemporary support for the vernacular in education owes much to Volosinov. Bakhtin's linguistic and literary work was later popularised outside the Soviet Union by Roman Jakobson.