Structuralism and Linguistics.

SHOUKAT LOHAR 

The writer is an assistant professor in English at Mehran University of engineering and technology Jamshoro. Twitter@Lohar 

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Overview 

This study focuses on the basic assumptions about structuralism as proposed by Ferdinand Saussure through his ideas of structure, language signs, the synchronic and diachronic study of language and langue, and parole. It also incorporates the criticism of Saussurean thought from different intellectual quarters. The study takes a background view of the life of Saussure and his intellectual legacy and attempts to explain in simple terms before indulging in the technicalities of the topic.   

Introduction

Structuralism, since its inception, has extended itself to various other fields and disciplines due to its wider applicability. However, this assignment only covers its relation to the field of Linguistics where it was born. The work undertaken here is aimed at focusing on the interpretation of structuralism theory as proposed and discussed by Saussure and his school of thought as well as the emergent new concepts about structuralism. The sign system in language, langue and parole, and other related concepts would be taken into consideration.   

Structuralism owes its origin to Ferdinand Saussure (26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913). He is renowned for his revolutionary ideas about the fields of linguistics and semiology. His founding role in semiology is only compared with the role of Charles Sanders Peirce. Saussure gave a new status to the understanding of language.  He believed that language should be approached not from the view of rules and regulations for correct or incorrect expressions rather it should be looked at from the angle of how people actually use it. He asserted that linguists should find out facts about language. He thought upon the language facts of meaning changes and sound changes. He discovered the internal sign system within the language. He regarded language as an integral part of human existence. He mentioned that language permeates every action, feeling, and experience of humans. It is inescapable. Humans are prisoners of the language. Unfortunately, he never wrote any book. It was only through the notes of lectures his students took that we came to know his linguistic theories in detail. Structuralism has undergone significant changes and modifications over time. It has bred post-structuralism to inform new learnings on its own system of ideas. Later the structuralism theory was extended to philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. In linguistics many linguists are still called as Sausurean, anti Saussurean, post Saussurean or non Saussurean. This proves that Saussure has laid such a foundation mark upon linguistics that no new theory can escape the given orbit of Saussure.

Roy Harris, the translator of his works, talks about Saussure’s role in linguistics:

Language is no longer regarded as peripheral to our grasp of the world we live in, but as central to it. Words are not mere vocal labels or communicational adjuncts superimposed upon an already given order of things. They are collective products of social interaction, essential instruments through which human beings constitute and articulate their world. This typically twentieth-century view of language has profoundly influenced developments throughout the whole range of human sciences. It is particularly marked in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology.

(Roy Harris, 1988) 

Language versus reality and idea: background debates before Saussure

Humans have the ability to express themselves through the agency of language. There may be various factors while relating to the experience of interpreting the phenomena. There would be different working elements like reality, idea, and sound, image, activity, et cetera. Language may mislead. This skepticism about language is quite an interesting debate in philosophy. There may occur failure between the word used and the reality. Let us think that we talk about anything does our expression precisely or correctly present our idea. Does our idea confirm the reality? Here is an example:

In previous times the earth was thought to be flat. In those days its dictionary meaning was “a flat terrestrial body inhabited by the human race.”  Now we know this definition is an example of a geological error. We can say there was no failure between the idea of that generation and the language. But the problem was between language and reality

In the English language definite article is used with the nouns to distinguish them from other nouns of the same kind. Hence it is a way to save it disappears in the plurality of that noun. Hence houses may be many but adding the with the house gives it limitation: the computer, the school, the star, the car (to pick one for reference out of many. But when we know the singular existence of a thing or person there is no need of adding the in this way. Hence in English, Earnest Hemingway wrote Farewell to Arms. No adding of the with Hemingway or Farewell to Arms, both being proper nouns. However, Italians do employ definite articles with certain proper nouns like Dante. This is not because there are many authors of Divine Comedy but because of certain queer usage of the Italian language. 

Roy Harris (1988: p.4) calls the former instance factual misrepresentation and the latter conceptual misrepresentation. Therefore for the nineteenth-century linguists, there was a double gap between languages and the truth. One was between idea and the language expression and the other was between idea and fact. It was also believed that languages were the accidental byproduct of the culture. They established that there was no connection between thought and linguistic expression. The language was arbitrary and dynamic. It keeps changing so how it could be reliable to approach the truth.  How could one repose trust in rational debates of philosophy? To approach truth through human language has always been a matter of debate among philosophers. . In the same way how could linguists call it a scientific study if the language itself as a tool was unreliable scientifically? Saussure worked upon these problems and came forward with his theory on signs and abstract structures in languages.

Diachronic and Synchronic study of language

Saussure compared language with the game of chase to stress the synchronic way of studying the language. During the game of chase, the state of the chase board constantly changes. But at any given point in time during the game, one can easily describe the position of the board by looking at the position of the items of the board at that time. There would be no need to understand that state of the board by bringing back in mind the previous moves of the items on the chessboard. This is the same with the studies of the languages when choosing between diachronic or synchronic approaches.   

His major concern was to reconstitute the science of linguistics as a systematic study that focuses on both the structural and functional features of the language. The basis of that systematic studies, he believed, should be the synchronic analysis of the state of the language at any given point in time, the formal and functional description of the regularities and laws which govern speech. Linguists must also engage, however, in the diachronic study, he argued, in the examination of the dynamic forces which produce language evolution.  

  (Susan Witting, 1975, p.145)

Saussure on sign system in Language

Humans live life to make sense of their every activity and experience. And prominent linguists have termed their thinking process as an effort to create signs for everything that humans do or feel. Peirce (Peirce 1931-58, 2.302) says that humans think only in signs. Saussure exactly thought like that. He gave more attention to the synchronic study of language than the diachronic studies which were prevalent in the field of philology of that time.

Language, Saussure, is defined as a twofold thing: 1) an inherited social system of arbitrary signs and 2) the active individual use of that system. Sign (word) he defines as the bond joining a concept and an acoustic image. The sign is arbitrary because the meaning of the word is not inherent in the sounds comprising that word but depends solely upon the conventional use of the word by the community.

(Waterman, 1956, p. 307) 

Saussure in his book, Course in General Linguistics, forms the central ideas about his structuralism in the first six chapters. He talks about the linguistic signs, which according to him is the basic unit of the language. He regards language as a large body of signs related to one another. The internal system of these signs is binary. It comprises a sound segment (signifier) and another segment, “thought” he termed as “signified”. The signifier is essentially a sound image than merely a sound. A particular sound image relates to a particular thought.

We can also say that every name that we think of any activity or entity is simply a sign. A sign is composed of:

• Sound, image, flavor, act, smell, any other sensory experience termed as signifier; and
•  the concept that we attach with that signifier

Saussure further thinks that how the same sign is used for different purposes. He gives the following example to understand the phenomenon:

We speak of the identity of two 8:25 p.m. Geneva to Paris trains that leave at twenty-four-hour intervals. We feel that it is the same train each day, yet everything, the locomotive, coaches, personnel, is probably different. If a street is demolished, then rebuilt, we say that it is the same street even though in a material sense perhaps nothing of the old one remains. Why can a street be completely rebuilt and still be the same? Because it does not constitute purely a material entity; it is based on certain conditions that are distinct from the materials that fit the conditions, e.g., its location, with respect to other streets. Similarly what makes the express is its hour of departure, its route, and in general, every circumstance that sets it apart from other trains.

(Saussure. et al, 1974)

Langue and Parole

Saussure goes beyond the concept of sign and further thinks of two broader aspects of language. He divides language into langue and parole. The more recent comparison between the two terms can be seen in Chomsky’s terms of competence and performance or that of information theorists: “code” and “message”.

According to Saussure langue is the system of signs and is an integral part of linguistics. It resides in parole. Historically, parole precedes langue. If langue is situated in parole then it should be a historically and culturally situated thing.

By langue, he meant the forms and system of language that included grammar, syntax, and spelling.

La langue is what individuals assimilate when they learn a language, a set of forms (D.Culler, 1986, p.40), or” hoard deposited by the practice of speaking in speakers who belong to the same community, a grammatical system which, to all intents and purposes, exists in the mind of each speaker”(Saussure, 1974, p.40). By parole, Saussure means speech acts of the people. However, the difference between the two is quite difficult. Saussure mainly relies on the psychological and social theories of Durkheim which can account for its ambiguity. Language too is a very ambiguous word when we consider the translation of la langue into English. The relationship between langue and parole is also complex enough. 

Suppose we were to propose as a provisional definition of “English” the following: the English may be defined as the set of utterances produced by speakers of English when they are speaking English. We see the ambiguity immediately. When we say of someone that he “speaks English” ( or is a “speaker of English”) we do not imply that he is actually speaking English on any one occasion. It would be quite reasonable to say of a parrot, in the appropriate circumstances, that it is speaking English”, but not that it “speaks English”. Let us follow de Saussure, and say that all those who “speak English” (or are “speakers of English’) share a particular langue and that the set of utterances which they produce when they are “speaking English” constitute instances of parole.

(Lyons, p. 51) 

Therefore, langue is a matter of multi-intelligence capacity in humans. It is a collective ability of all humans. On the other hand, parole is individual intonation, the pitch of voice, the particular set of words of the habit of an individual which makes his or her identity. These utterances or acts of speech combine the thought of the individual with the sound pattern of the words. In this way, in structuralism, every utterance has underlying laws which run those processes of utterances. However, the intimate correlation of those underlying laws is inexplicable as to why are they the way they are.  

The linguist Roman Jakobson suggested that we can understand language functions through the phenomena of the interaction of paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of language. However in the coming years more comprehensible terms were created to understand the difference between langue and parole like language as a system and language in use, or competence and performance as by Chomsky.

Criticism on Saussurean Structuralism

Bakhtin gave a longer life to the legacy of Saussure by criticizing him. Bakhtin’s method was polemical. He was a literary critic and philosopher. He was interested in matters of aesthetics. His approach was Marxist as opposed to Russian Formalism and Saussurean Linguistics. He said that Saussure presents language as abstract and static which ignores its social and dynamic dimensions. Saussure construed the role of language in society as irrelevant. This assertion comes from Saussure’s last sentence of the Course in General Linguistics where Saussure says that “The true and sole object of linguistics is language considered in and for itself.”

This statement of Saussure earned for him the denouncement of Marxists.

However, it provided an easy target for the Marxist philosophers and the theoreticians of linguists who were keen on denouncing Saussure as an icon of bourgeois intellectual order. This attitude was to be perpetuated by the subsequent literature inspired by Marxism in which it became commonplace to refer to Saussure as the repulsive pole of ideological error and intellectual sin.  

(Bouissac, 2010, p. 133)

Derrida, a philosopher, rejected all the philosopher icons of his day, including Saussure whose popularity was increasing at the time.

Derrida who had only a superficial knowledge of linguistics brashly reversed the hierarchical relationship of spoken to a written language that was the basis of Saussure’s linguistic stand, and paradoxically claimed for writing an absolute primacy over speech.

(Bouissac, 2010, p. 133)

Conclusion

Saussure clearly gave a new beginning to the field of linguistics. He introduced it as a science and; hence, gave it a new epistemological foundation. 

The young Saussure entered linguistics at the time of a paradigm shift, at the point of divergence between the naturalistic view of language and a novel, scientific approach to languages conceived as directly and indirectly observable phenomena. 

(Bouissac, 2010, p. 127)

It is unfortunate that Saussure never himself wrote a book. All we get about his views on language is either through his notes or the students who preserved his ideas while his lecture. While he was still a young man he had become a very active member of the Neogrammarian movement of his time. He just made a wave when he published his monograph on the system of Indo-European vowels. His ideas, in this regard, had to lead to the theory of phoneme. .  Greimas developed semi or-linguistics whose seeds he claimed to have found from the theory of signified of Saussure.  Saussure would attract large attendance of students and foreign scholars in his lectures. It was due to his innovativeness in his thoughts. His ideas are not a kind of well-organized theory that can constitute an authoritative book.

Thus, when during the 1960s, in the wake of Structuralism, semiology (semiotics) became the order of the day in France, Saussure was celebrated as the founding father of the new philosophy signs that stimulated a massive wave of publications in cultural analyses from architecture to music, and from literature to film, advertisement and fashion, to name only a few of the domains that were construed as a system of signs to which structural linguistic models could be productively applied.

(Bouissac, 2010, p. 132)

In this way, the structuralist view of Saussure in linguistics has a broader impact on various generations of linguists and scholars of diverse fields. 

References

Roy Harris (1988) Language, Saussure, and Wittgenstein: how to play games with the words. London: Routledge.

Susan Witting (1975). The Historical Development of Structuralism. Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 58, No. 2. Penn State University Press

Peirce, Charles Sanders (1931-58): Collected Writings (8 Vols.). (Ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss & Arthur W Burks). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

John T. Waterman (Oct. 1956). Ferdinand de Saussure-Forerunner of Modern Structuralism. The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 40, No. 6. Wiley on behalf of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations.

Ferdinand de Saussure: Jonathan. D. Culler; Charles Balley; Albert Sechehave; Wade Baskin. (1974). Course in General Linguistics. London, Fontana: Collins.

Jonathon.D.Culler. (1986). Ferdinand Saussure. Cornell University Press.

John Lyons. (1968). Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge University Press

Bouissac, Paul. (2010). Saussure: A Guide For The Perplexed. Continuum International Publishing

C. Fellowman

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