English Linguistics: Essentials

2.1 Structuralism (p. 14-15)

Saussure is generally considered to be the founder of modern linguistics, more precisely the founder of structuralism, the ‘bible’ of which is the Cours de linguistique générale (1916). The Cours offers an introduction to general linguistics based on Saussure’s lecture materials and the lecture notes taken by his disciples and was not published until after his death (in 1913). In this book the reader will find thorough discussions of numerous ideas concerning a new approach to the study of language only some of which are found in the works of linguists at the end of the 19th century (e.g. in the writings of the German Georg von der Gabelentz and, above all, those of William Dwight Whitney, the eminent American linguist of the late 19th century). Besides the all-important separation of synchrony and diachrony, and the call for the primacy of synchrony, this set of ideas includes, above all, the call for a kind of linguistics which solely concentrates on language as a closed system in which all elements are linked to one another, and in which the value (valeur) of every single element is defined by its place in the system alone. For example, the Simple Past in English (she worked) has a different status than its counterpart in German, the preterite (Präteritum), because it contrasts both with the Past Progressive (she was working) and the Present Perfect (she has worked). German grammar does not only lack a counterpart of the English progressive form, Präteritum (sie arbeitete) and Perfekt (sie hat gearbeitet) are in most contexts interchangeable without a difference in meaning. The different status of Simple Past and Präteritum within the grammars of English and German, respectively, thus partly results from the value of the Present Perfect in the English tense system in contrast to the value of the Perfekt in the German tense system. The view that every linguistic sign is part of the system and has no existence outside of it is an important reason for the structuralist position that every language system needs to be considered by itself.

According to Saussure, linguistics should solely be concerned with the systematic regularities of the abstract language system which is shared by all members of a speech community (langue), and not with its concrete use by the individual (parole). What stands at the centre of structuralist linguistics is the determination and description of the individual elements of this system (on all structural levels: sounds, words and their components, sentences and their constituents), and the relationships existing between them on each of these levels. Within any system, there are two basic types of relationships between linguistic units which have to be distinguished: relationships of choice or interchangeability on the vertical axis (paradigmatic relationships), and relationships of "chain" or combination on the horizontal axis (syntagmatic relationships). A paradigmatic relationship holds between the initial sounds of ban, can, Dan, fan, tan and van, whereas the relationship between any of these sounds and the two following sounds is a syntagmatic one.