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Structuralist linguistics
This article deals only with the tradition in linguistics founded by the Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). For information on the American tradition of
structuralist linguistics, see (POST)-BLOOMFIELDIAN AMERICAN STRUCTURAL
GRAMMAR.
Saussure is often described as the founder of modern linguistics, because it was he
who first turned European linguistics away from its exclusive occupation with historical
explanations of linguistic phenomena towards descriptions of the structure of language at
a particular point in time. His famous Course in General Linguistics (1916) was not, in
fact, published during his lifetime, but was put together by two of his colleagues, Charles
Bally and Albert Sechehaye, from the lecture notes of students who followed the three
courses in general linguistics that Saussure taught at the University of Geneva between
1906 and 1911.
The nineteenth century is renowned for its occupation with historical explanation, its
historicism. In linguistics, historicism was evident in the view shared by most
researchers that the only valid explanation in the field was historical; languages are as
they are because, over time, they have been subject to various internal and external causal
factors affecting sound, syntax, and lexis. Therefore, linguists saw their task as consisting
mainly of the comparison of Indo-European languages and, on the basis of such
comparison, of discovering the principles guiding the changes undergone by the
languages (see HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS).
Saussure does not claim that such historical, or diachronic, studies of the evolution of
languages are worthless; he merely maintains that they should be kept apart from, and
should not preclude, synchronic language studies aimed at describing a language as a
whole at a particular point in time. Mixing the two is bound to mislead: the fact that the
French for ‘step’, pas, and the French negative adverb, also pas, have the same origin is
of no importance whatsoever to present-day users of French; the historical relationship
between the two terms is of no consequence for the way in which each functions in the
system now. Similarly, the fact that ought is an old past-tense form of owe in English
should not be used as an explanatory feature in any account of how ought is used in
present-day English. The distinction between synchronic and diachronic language study
is the first of the four famous Saussurean dichotomies.
The language as it exists at a particular time is described as a system, which Saussure
calls la langue. Langue is the underlying system on the basis of which speakers are able
to understand and produce speech, and it forms a second dichotomy with parole, the
actual utterances speakers produce. However, no speaker has complete command of
langue, which only exists fully as a shared, social phenomenon. It is thus not the same
notion as Chomsky’s competence—although had Saussure wished to posit an ideal
speaker, as Chomsky does, then that speaker would presumably have had a complete
command of langue. Parole, on the other hand, is always an individual realization of the
system. The distinction between langue and parole is a second dichotomy, although