Structuralism in Linguistics

Structuralism in Linguistics
Structuralism is a general approach in various academic disciplines that explores the interrelationships between fundamental elements of some kind, upon which some higher mental, linguistic, social, cultural etc "structures" are built, through which then meaning is produced within a particular person, system, culture.
Structuralism appeared in academic psychology for the first time in the 19th century and then reappeared in the second half of the 20th century, when it grew to become one of the most popular approaches in the academic fields that are concerned with analyzing language, culture, and society. The work of Ferdinand de Saussure is generally considered to be a starting point of the 20th century structuralism. As with any cultural movement, the influences and developments are complex.
Ferdinand de Saussure is the originator of the 20th century reappearance of structuralism, specifically in his 1916 book Course in General Linguistics, where he focused not on the use of language (parole, or talk), but rather on the underlying system of language (langue) and called his theory semiotics. This approach focused on examining how the elements of language related to each other in the present, that is, 'synchronically' rather than 'diachronically'. Finally, he argued that linguistic signs were composed of two parts, a signifier (the sound pattern of a word, either in mental projection - as when we silently recite lines from a poem to ourselves - or in actual, physical realization as part of a speech act) and a signified (the concept or meaning of the word). This was quite different from previous approaches which focused on the relationship between words on the one hand and things in the world that they designate, on the other.
Saussure's Course influenced many linguists in the period between WWI and WWII. In America, for instance, Leonard Bloomfield developed his own version of structural linguistics, as did Louis Hjelmslev in Denmark. In France Antoine Meillet and Émile Benveniste would continue Saussure's program. Most importantly, however, members of the Prague School of linguistics such as Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy conducted research that would be greatly influential.
The clearest and most important example of Prague School structuralism lies in phonemics. Rather than simply compile a list of which sounds occur in a language, the Prague School sought to examine how they were related. They determined that the inventory of sounds in a language could be analyzed in terms of a series of contrasts. Thus in English the sounds /p/ and /b/ represent distinct phonemes because there are cases (minimal pairs) where the contrast between the two is the only difference between two distinct words (e.g. 'pat' and 'bat'). Analyzing sounds in terms of contrastive features also opens up comparative scope - it makes clear, for instance, that the difficulty Japanese speakers have differentiating between /r/ and /l/ in English is due to the fact that these two sounds are not contrastive in Japanese. While this approach is now standard in linguistics, it was revolutionary at the time. Phonology would become the paradigmatic basis for structuralism in a number of different forms.

Synchronic vs. Diachronic

In addition to separating his approach from the prescriptivist mode of analysis, Saussure also sought to distinguish his approach from that of historical linguistics.Historical linguistics is diachronic, "across time." It seeks to show where languages came from, how they are related and how they have changed over time. While historically important, such research is not necessarily important in the study of meaning, which Saussure wanted to emphasize. Where a word came from is not important for understanding its meaning. The fact that "beef" is an Anglicization of a Middle French word that entered into English after the Norman conquest is completely unnecessary for understanding its use in contemporary speech.Saussure argued instead for a linguistics that was synchronic "with time." This form of linguistics would describe languages as they work in contemporary life.

Langue vs. Parole
The object of linguistics, Saussure argued, must be language (langue) and not speech (parole). Language, for Saussure, is the symbolic system through which we communicate. Speech refers to actual utterances. Since we can communicate an infinite number of utterances, it is the system behind them that is important.
Saussure illustrated this with reference to a chess game. The chess game has its rules and its pieces and its board. These define the game. Actual games of chess are only interesting to the participants. Thus in linguistics, while we may collect our data from actual instances of speech but the goal is to work back to the system of rules and words that organize speech.
Social factThis understanding of speech treats it as a "social fact." The concept of a social fact was derived from the work of the great French social theorist Emil Durkheim.

Language is a social fact because:
a) It pre-exists us. We learn language through our socialization experience. We use language as part of our daily life but we do not invent it.
b) It post-exists us. The language we speak will continue to be spoken in much the same ways after we are gone. Its existence does not depend on us as individuals.
c) It has more power over us than we have over it. The language system sets constraints on us. We can have little, if any, control over how language changes while we are living speakers of it.

This view of language says it is not the sum of individual speakers and their utterances. Rather, it is the rules and the layout and the tokens that we can use to produce a bounded but infinite set of utterances.


Signifier vs. Signified
The tokens of chess are its pieces; the tokens of language are signs.A sign is something that stands for something else. A sign thus consists of two components: a signifier and a signified. In the case of words, the signifier is a particular sound and the signified is the concept it stands for.ConceptSaussure is very careful to emphasize that words do not refer to things in the world but to ideas we have about the world. The word "tree" does not refer to the thing in the world but rather to a concept we have in our heads. Linking these concepts to the real world involves particular kinds of language work. One uses deictic markers like "this" or "that" to relate concepts to objects in the world.
ArbitrarinessSaussure also emphasizes that the relations between signifier and signified are arbitrary, that they are based on social convention and not any natural or essential link. "Dog," "kutta," and "shwaan" can all stand for roughly the same concept because there is nothing about any of these sounds that is more doglike than any other.The semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce argued that not all relations of significations are completely arbitrary. He suggested three kinds of sign relations:i) IndexicalIndexical signs have a relationship of continuity or causality with the signified. When Robinson Crusoe sees Friday's footprint in the sand it signals to him "another human" because only a human foot can leave a human footprint (unless we postulate intentional fraud). Likewise, smoke signifies fire because fire produces smoke.ii) IconicityIconic signs are connected by resemblance. Some words are coined to resemble the concepts they signify. "Tick-tock" stands for the sound of a clock because it is supposed to sound like the sound of a clock. In literary contexts, this is called onomatopoeia. Although it has only restricted use in English, some languages, like Korean and Japanese, have large iconic vocabularies.iii) SymbolicPeirce reserved the word symbol for signs that were strictly conventional. However, a number of linguists and semioticians, notably Umberto Eco (1976) have argued that even iconic and indexical signs are ultimately symbolic and arbitrary. Certainly in language there are no pure indexical signs; a grunt of pain is indexical but it is not a word. To articulate our pain we need symbols. Likewise, resemblance depends upon social conventions. "Bow-wow," "arf" and "woah" are all supposed to resemble a dog's bark yet the arrangement of phonemes is arbitrary and conventional.


Syntagmatic vs. Paradigmatic

Language is made up of signs. Saussure calls it a system of signs. But how are we to describe the systemic part of language? Saussure argued that languages are “doubly articulated” semiotic systems. That is, languages are able to carry meaning because they are organized at every level by two sets of rules, syntagmatic andparadigmatic. At the phonological level, for example, paradigmatic relations determine what sounds out of the total stream of possible sounds are meaningful for a given language, while syntagmatic rules determine how sounds can combined to create meanings. Both of these systems are arbitrary – that is, there is no necessary or natural connection between any set of sounds and its meaning. In natural languages, one set of these rules is called a grammar. Most people cannot articulate the grammar of their own language – they just speak it. But linguists working with small discrete bits of language – words and sentences – can extract and describe the rules behind them.
Syntagm

Syntagmatic relations are relations of signification organized in time and space. A paradigm is a set of signs, and a syntagm is a new sign that has been constructed by combining the signs in the paradigm under the guidance of a code. For example, an alphabet is a set of signs, a paradigm. Any word or other meaningful text constructed from them is a syntagm. There is nothing free about how syntagms are formed; they are never just randomly thrown together, but are constructed using certain rules. In English , at the morphological level, the sound /b/ at the beginning of a word can be followed by only a small set of other morphemes: vowels, /l/, /r/ or /y/. It is impossible that /b/ should follow /t/ in a normal word. In Arabic, it is impossible that there should be three consonants in a row without a vowel to break them up. These kinds of rules constitute a syntagmatic structure. A collection of syntagms formed from one paradigm can themselves in turn become a paradigm. This happens in languages. In English and Arabic, the alphabet is the paradigm from which the syntagms of words are formed. In turn, the respective sets of English and Arabic words become the paradigm from which English and Arabic sentences are formed. We describe this ability when we call a semiotic system “doubly-articulated.” ParadigmBut if syntagmatic structures arrange elements in meaningful relations in time and space, there is the important question of where these elements come from in the first place. Signs carry meanings apart from their relations to one another in time and space. Part of this meaning derives from reference. Signs refer to things in the world or, more accurately, to ideas about things in the world – which is why there can be signs that refer to imaginary things like flying carpets or unicorns. The words “sheep” and “mouton” both refer to the same animal. But this is not all there is to the meaning of these words. According to Saussure, we produce meaning not only by linking signs together in time and space, but also by doing something which is outside that temporal sequence: we choose a sign from a whole range of alternative signs. Saussure calls this kind of meaning the “value” (valeur) of a sign. The French mouton may have the same referential meaning as the English sheep, but it does not have the same value. The reason is that English has the terms mutton and sheep, a distinction which is not available in French. Saussure emphasizes that a sign gains its value from its relation to other signs. When a journalist writes: A leading Iraqi official today denounced the U.N’s arms inspection commission … she chooses each sign from a range of alternatives. She could also have written: Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz … condemned … A top Hussein aide … reviled … Iraq … refused to cooperate with … When we look at such a range of possibilities, we are examining the paradigmatic relationship between signs.
A paradigm is a set of interchangeable possibilities, each of which has a value quite different from other members of the same paradigm. The value of a sign and its referential meaning are not unrelated. At the most primary level of language, the phonetic, the meaning of sounds derives from their binary oppositions, their distinctions from one another along some axis. Neither /s/ nor /z/ has a referential meaning. The meaning of the sounds is derived from their similarity and difference from one another; the s/z distinction is one of unvocalized/vocalized. Once you’ve discovered such a feature (vocalization) you will discover that many other sounds in the language depend on the same characteristic.

Rishi Kumar Nagar