Structural Linguistics

from Saussure to Bloomfield

Angelina A. Aquino
Lingg 206: Grammatical Analysis I
University of the Philippines Diliman

1 What is structuralism? 2 European tradition

Structuralism is a philosophy first established by In Europe, structuralism continued to develop un-
Ferdinand de Saussure in the early 20th century, der several schools of linguistics, the most notable
which states that elements of language and culture of which are the Geneva, Prague, and Copenhagen
are defined in terms of their relationship between linguistic circles. During this period, several French
other elements in the larger structure or system to and British linguists also made significant contribu-
which they belong. tions to modern linguistic thought.
...What distinguishes Saussure’s thought The Geneva school, having been composed of the
from that of the preceding scholars is students of Saussure who went on to publish the
its systemic approach: every linguistic Course on General Linguistics, was primarily con-
unit can be defined only by virtue of cerned with reconstructing and building upon Saus-
the system of relations it has with the sure’s original ideas. Interestingly, its key members
other units. Another characteristic fea- adopted a more psychologistic view, focusing on the
ture of Saussure’s thought is his attempt study of parole rather than langue. Charles Bally
at building an autonomous linguistics, developed the notion of “stylistics,” distinguishing
namely independent from psychology, so- dictum (the content of utterances) and modus (the
ciology, or any other discipline, contrary manner of presentation), while Albert Sechehaye
to the methods of most linguists imme- explored the relationship between the social and
diately preceding him. individual sides of language.
—Prof. Giorgio Graffi, in The Oxford
Handbook of the History of Linguistics The Prague linguistic circle included various Czech
(2013) and Russian linguists, including Roman Jakobson,
Saussure (1857–1913) was a Swiss linguist who stud- Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Vilém Mathesius, and Jan Muka-
ied and taught in several cities and countries, includ- řovský. They made key contributions to phonology,
ing Geneva, Leipzig, Berlin, and Paris. He is widely recognizing the phoneme as the minimal differential
considered as the father of semiotics (the study of unit in language, as well as developing the method
signs) and structuralism. He is best known for his of distinctive feature analysis (e.g. +/− voice, +/−
Cours de linguistique gènèrale (Course on General nasal) which was then extended to morphology and
Linguistics)—which was not, in fact, his own work, syntax. The Prague school was also known for their
but a compilation of notes from students of his lec- theory of structural functionalism, which explored
tures in Geneva, published posthumously in 1916. the various functions of language with respect to
the persons involved, the context, the medium, and
Saussure’s key ideas include: even the message itself.
—langue, the social and arbitrary system of language,
and parole, or individual language acts; The Copenhagen school, founded by Louis Hjelmslev
—the concept of a sign, which is composed of both and Viggo Brøndal, was primarily concerned with
signifié (the signified, or “concept”) and signifiant Hjelmslev’s theory of glossematics, which defined the
(the signifier, or “sound-image”); glosseme as the smallest meaningful unit of language
—the duality of synchronic and diachronic linguistics, in both the content and expression planes. They
and his emphasis on the former; expounded on Saussure’s idea of signs having dif-
—the two axes of linguistic analysis: syntagmatic ferent meanings and forms within different systems
(relating to sequence and order) and paradigmatic and languages, and also extended the concept of
(relating to co-occurrence and substitution). expression in a language to include not only speech

1
Structural Linguistics 2

and text, but also facial and bodily expressions. lexical grammatical definition
phoneme taxeme primitive feature
Other important ideas during this time were Gustave morpheme tagmeme smallest meaningful unit
Guillaume’s theory of psychomechanics (involving sememe episememe meaning of unit
the different dimensions of language such as time,
space, and intent), Lucien Tesnière’s valency theory Tab. 1: Bloomfield’s “emic” system
(concering arguments of a predicate) and depen-
dency grammar, and John Rupert Firth’s ideas on The post-Bloomfieldians, or adherents of Bloom-
collocational meaning (words which occur in similar field’s structuralist thought, then built upon his
contexts have similar meanings) and prosody. ideas. Zellig Harris was primarily concerned with
the investigation of discovery procedures for mor-
3 American tradition phemes, in the same manner as phonemes are found
through contrasting minimal pairs, and was a propo-
On the other side of the Atlantic, the key proponent nent of distributional methodology. Charles Francis
of structural linguistics was Leonard Bloomfield, Hockett coined the terms “morph” and “allomorph”
who sought to establish linguistics as a scientific dis- as a morphological parallel to the concepts of “phone”
cipline and subsequently adopted Saussure’s struc- and “allophone,” and went on to analyze the design
turalist theory of language as an abstract system features of human languages versus animal commu-
independent of psychology. His ideas permeated nications. Kenneth Lee Pike furthered the theory of
American linguistics throughout the first half of the tagmemics, creating terms such as “syntagmeme” for
20th century, and the work of his successors came higher levels of linguistic structure (phrase, sentence,
to be known as post-Bloomfieldian linguistics. paragraph), and also wrote about the distinction be-
tween “emic” and “etic” views (from inside and from
The American linguistic tradition was originally outside) for applications beyond linguistic analysis.
founded on anthropological research, led by the work
of Franz Boas (known as the father of modern an-
thropology) and Edward Sapir. They published
4 Applications to Philippine linguistics
various works on American indigenous languages, Structuralist analysis of Philippine languages was
and made contributions to phonology and distribu- primarily inherited from the American tradition, the
tional analysis. A student of Sapir’s, Benjamin Lee Philippines having been a U.S. colony throughout
Whorf, was a proponent of what is now known as the period of development for structural linguistics.
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or the idea that a per- Bloomfield himself authored two works on Philippine
son’s language determines their possible frames of languages: Tagalog texts with grammatical analysis
thought. (1917) and Outline of Ilocano syntax (1942). The
concept of tagmemes was also used in several gram-
During this period, Bloomfield (1887-1949) began matical descriptions, including A tagmemic gram-
his study on Indo-European languages, and subse- mar of Ivatan (Hidalgo & Hidalgo, 1971), and A
quently developed his own linguistic theories and description of Hiligaynon syntax (Wolfenden, 1975).
writings. His early work (An Introduction to the Much of the research and publications by the Sum-
Study of Language, 1914) was influenced by the mer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) and the University
psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, who interpreted the of Hawai’i’s Pacific and Asian Linguistics Institute
sentence as an analysis of a speaker’s thought or (PALI) also adhered to structuralist views.
“total experience.” He would later retract his psy-
chologist stance and adopt a more Saussurean point
of view, stating that the goal of linguistics was to References
present the “facts of language” without an account
[1] R. H. Robins (1997). A Short History of Linguistics.
“in terms of mind.”
Essex: Addison Wesley Longman Limited.

Bloomfield went on to write A Set of Postulates for [2] P. H. Matthews (1993). Grammatical Theory in the
the Science of Language (1926), which gave concise United States from Bloomfield to Chomsky. Cam-
definitions for linguistic terms in the manner of bridge: Cambridge University Press.
mathematical axioms, as well as his seminal work,
[3] G. Graffi (2015). History of Linguistics Handout 2 –
Language (1933). In this work, Bloomfield proposed Linguistics in the first half of the 20th century.
a system of “emic” units (Table 1), distinguishing
lexical and grammatical components of language. He [4] L. A. Reid (1981). Philippine linguistics: The state
describes the morpheme as the smallest meaningful of the art: 1970–1980. In Philippine studies: Political
unit within words, and introduces the tagmeme as science, economics, and linguistics, ed. by Donn V.
its grammatical equivalent. Hart, 212–273.