Linguistic Structuralism 2000 words

Discuss the motivation, methods, successes and limitations of the 20th century enterprise of linguistic structuralism.

 

Linguistic structuralism can be traced as developing from Ferdinand Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, a text reconstructed by editors from notes taken by Saussure’s students from his lectures between 1906 and 1911. I will consider here motivations for linguistic structuralism, including a critique of neogrammarian approaches and the appeal of language as a system of signs. Next, I focus on its methods including divisions of langue and parole, the arbitrary relation between signifier and signified, and the relation between paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes. Its successes include the way it has been taken up and developed in various ways by linguistics and across related fields. Finally, I focus on some of its limitations, including the way it has been criticized as a rigid and ahistorical system, which allows no capacity for change.

 

The approach of linguistic structuralism can be seen to be motivated partly in opposition to a neogrammarian approach. According to this approach, ‘sound change’ is of the fundamental aspects of linguistics. Rules that govern sound change are “exclusively phonological” and “exceptionless” (Bynon 2004: 25). Whay Bynon means here is that these rules, firstly, are independent of morphological, semantic and syntactic functions of the word. Secondly, they do not allow for exception in the sense that if any data falls outside of the rule, then the whole rule is invalidated. The other fundamental aspect of the neogrammarian approach is ‘analogy’ which dealt with processes at a grammatical level. As can be seen then, the approach presumes an independent structure for phonological and grammatical levels, what Martinet has described as “a dual articulation of language” (Martinet 1964: 22).

 

The systematic presentation of grammar in the neogrammarian model was deductive, starting from a hypothetical structure and then deriving rules from this for forms of historical languages. This leads to a history where, as Bynon points out:

 

The best indication that a language belongs to a given family is the fact that it retains, as synchronic irregularities, remnants of the productive rules of earlier grammars of that language family. (Bynon 2004: 75)

 

This focus on synchronically irregular forms led to a lack of focus on synchronic structure. New language states, rather than being subjected to independent analysis, would be considered in relation to earlier states. One of the motivations for linguistic structuralism was to provide an alternative to this, focusing on language instead as an integrated whole. Bynon defines the structuralist approach:

 

A language is seen as… as system in which each unit is defined by its overall place in the network of oppositions. This applies equally to all languages, including related ones…and even the successive states of one and the same language. (Bynon 2004: 76)

 

The shift from neogrammatical approaches is here evident, and structuralist linguistics operates as a critique for the lack of analysis of the synchronic system at each stage of the development of lexical forms.

 

Structuralism essentially proposes that language can be understood as a system of signs. Saussure introduced the distinction between langue and parole. Parole is the individual use of language, but langue is the system of underlying conventions and rules that organize language. Langue is social, as described by Roland Barthes, “it is essentially a collective contract which one must accept in its entirety if one wants to communicate” (Barthes 1967: 14). Examination of the langue could be undertaken via analysis of the parole. This was done by examining how elements of language related to one another synchronically (rather than diachronically). Saussure divided the linguistic sign into signifier and signified. The signifier is the sound or inscription, while the signified is the concept or mental image created. If I write ‘car’ for example, then the written word is the signifier, while my mental image of a car is the signified. Together they make up the sign. Saussure takes this further to propose that the connection between signifier and signified is arbitrary. It is conventional but not logically necessary. The word or sound I use to signify my mental image of a car could equally be different to the word or sound someone else uses. Meaning, therefore, is not essential to the word, but is produced through a process of difference between that word and other words. Meaning, in structuralism, is relational. As Storey argues, “meaning is produced, not through a one-to-one relation to things in the world, but by establishing difference” (Storey 2006: 87). ‘Car’ only has meaning in relation to, for example, ‘bike’, ‘van’, ‘far’ and ‘cat’. These examples of parole, then only have meaning in relation to the socially accepted codes of the langue they are structured by. Structuralism works in this way to challenge correspondence theories of the word-object relation. Saussure gives the example of Boeuf and Ochs, both used as signifiers for the same signified, “not linked by any interior relationship with the sequence of sounds which serves as its signifier” (De Saussure 1974: 100).

 

Saussure also showed how meaning is produced across the syntagmatic axis horizontally, and across the vertical axis paradigmatically. ‘I am writing an essay’ for example, is meaningful through the accumulation of the different words, completed when the final word is spoken, or continued when added to ‘I am writing an essay about structuralism’ (syntagmatically). Meaning could also be changed by substitution (paradigmatically), “I am writing a book’. The meaning of the sentences is produced through a combination of selection and combination. If, as structuralism claims, the relationship between sign (signifier and signified) and referent (material reality of the world) is equally arbitrary, then language plays the role, not of mimetically reflecting the world around us, but actively producing it through the act of speech or writing. Linguistic structure shapes the reality of the world.  As Saussure argues:

 

In language there are only differences without positive terms…Language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the system, but only phonic differences that have issued from the system. (De Saussure 1974: 120)

 

This can be seen as part of the appeal of linguistic structuralism. The lack of inherent meaning in language, arbitrary and relational concepts of signification can be read historically in relation to broader discourses of 20th Century modernism, including for example a shift in literature from modes of objective narration to experiments in formal recreations of subjective experience. Linguistic structuralism can be understood specifically as a 20th Century enterprise in terms not only of its methodologies but also the ways they were taken up in discourses of modernism as a whole.

 

One of the ways Structuralism can be seen as a success then is its broad application across other fields. Reading texts as complex systems of interrelated parts became dominant in 20th Century literary studies or cultural analysis, as in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1973) for example. Here, Barthes uses structuralism to read, for example, wrestling or soap powders, as signifying texts. His aim here is to make explicit what is coded as implicit in the texts and reveal their ideological implications.

 

Where there is only equivalence, [the reader] sees a kind of causal process; the signifier and signified have in his eyes a kind of natural relationship. This confusion can be expressed otherwise…Myth is read as a factual system, whereas it is but a semiological system. (Barthes 1967: 300)

 

Barthes’ work can be seen as heavily influenced by De Saussure’s definitions of ‘semiology’:

 

Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable to a system of writing…A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable. (Saussure 1974: 16)

 

Other linguists have taken up structuralist theories into new directions. Louis Hjelmslev for example draws on the work of Saussure in developing his ‘glossematics’ from an attempt to provide an alternative concept of the phoneme. In his work, the sign was a function between two forms – content and expression. Hjelmslev introduced the notion of ‘purport’ to structuralist theory to refer to a non-linguistic element, “purport has no possible existence except for being substance for one form or another” (Hjelmslev 1959: 52). Purport, in other words, is ‘asignifying’, between content and expression.

 

Such developments start to reveal limitations in structuralist theory. Firstly, as suggested by Hjelmslev’s developments, it fails to account for the potential of asignifying expression, or anything within the system which can’t be defined in terms of structures of signification. Philosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari have emphasized and developed the notion of ‘affect’ as asignifying force, and this acts as another critique of structuralism.

 

Another criticism is how such focus on structure can allow no possibility for change. As Bynon summarises:

 

If every element is dependent on every other element in a system, how is change possible at all? And on what basis is one to identify specific sounds and forms of different systems as being diachronically ‘the same’? (Bynon 2004: 105)

 

This criticism highlights the rigidity of a structuralist approach, which can lead to many problems. Other models, such as the ‘transformative-generative’ approach, which develops from the work of Chomsky, propose the potential of creativity within a language, or in other words the possibility for a speaker to produce a sentence they have never heard before. Others such as Labov, have challenged Chomsky’s creation of a standardized system of language produced by constant relations, as well as the rigidity of structuralism, by focusing on lines of continuous variation, and making pragmatics the major assumption of linguistics. Quirk et al. define pragmatics as language in communicational contexts:

 

There is a certain division of labour between grammar and pragmatics whereby the more the context contributes to communicative force of an utterance, the less need there is for the utterance to be grammatically explicit. (Quirk et al. 1985: 88)

 

The performative aspect of language, as pointed out by J.L.Austin, is another element lacking from structuralist analysis. The words ‘I do’ in a marriage ceremony produce an effect through the act of their utterance in excess of a differential relation. To return to my example before, to state ‘I am writing an essay’ may pragmatically have different meaning from its structural relations. It may mean ‘no’ in response to the question ‘Do you want to go for a coffee?’. It may also function performatively in the sense that I may say it, repeating it perhaps as a mantra to focus myself on writing.

 

Post-structuralist theorists have criticized structuralism from many directions, focusing for example on is rigidity, ahistoricism or reductiveness. Jacques Derrida criticized the binary opposition fundamental to structuralism. He argued that the binary opposition is not something natural but a structure of power, dominance and subordination, in which one term is defined in relation to another. This relation of power is produced through the way that relationship is constructed. A deconstructive reading of a text for example may highlight and reveal the way language constructs binary oppositions such as ‘black’ and ‘white’, or ‘man’ and ‘woman’, where one term is privileged over the other. Structuralism’s system of difference did not allow for these value judgements, masquerading them as ‘natural’. Derrida re-read the concept of difference to include not only meaning through relation but also the sense that we never achieve meaning as it is endlessly deferred through a chain of signification with no origins and no end. Other post-structuralist critics have argued that structuralism’s focus on linguistic structure does not account for social or historical factors, which affect language change and development. Foucault for example, argues that the ‘truth’ of a discourse is related to who is saying it and where it is said, more than just its internal structure (Storey 2006: 103).

 

Linguistic structuralism then, emerged with the work of De Saussure, and acted as an important critique of the neogrammatical approach. Its fundamental elements such as the examination of the arbitrary relation between signifier and signified, and division between langue and parole have achieved considerable success, both in linguistic analysis and in developments in related fields. Its limitations include its rigidity, its inability to account for asignification, and its failure to account for change, as well as its avoidance of other social, historical or contextual factors.

 

 

Bibliography

 

Barthes, R. (1967) Elements of Semiology. London: Jonathan Cape.

 

Bynon, T (2004) Historical Linguistics . Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

 

Culler, J.  (1976) Saussure, Bloomfield

 

De Saussure, F. (1974) Course in General Lingustics. Open Court Classics.

 

Hjelmslev, L. (1969) Prologemna to a Theory of Language. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

 

Lentricchia, F. (1981) After The New Criticism. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

 

Martinet, A. (1964) Elements of General Linguistics. London: Faber.

 

Quirk, R. et al (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of The English Language. London: Longman.

 

Storey, J. (2006) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture London: Pearson.