‘The linguistics encyclopedia $88 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 tumed European linguistics away from its exclusive occupation with historical explanations of linguistic phenomena towards descriptions ofthe structure of language at a particular point in time. His famous Course in General Linguistics (1918) 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 1908 and 1911. The nineteenth century is renowned Tor 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, overtime, 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, ney (latiguages) are worthless; he merely maintains that they should be kept apart from, and should not preclude, synehronic ianguage 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 Ia langue. pa es 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AZ 589 actually, langue and parole form a trichotomy with langage, which is the faculty of speech which all humans are endowed wit. ‘The language system is seen as a system of signs. By sign, Saussure means the relationship between ‘and some acoustic noise or graphic form ‘which stands for the concept, namely the signifier. The bond between the signified and the signifier is absolutely jarbityang as is shown by the existence of more than one language in the world: the concept ‘tree is signified in English by éree, in German by Baum, and so on, and no signifier is any more appropriate than any other (of course, once a signifier for a particular concept has been established within a community, speakers have to abide by it; the sign relation is only arbitrary in principle; speakers cannot go around renaming concepts at will—at least not if they want to be understood by other speakers; there is, as Saussure puts it, a type of contract in operation ina society by virtue of which langue exists, and which binds speakers to rely on it when engaging in parole). ‘The signs in the language system are interdependent. Each sign has a value, by which Saussure means something very like meaning, and each sign has the value it has just because this is the value that all of the other signs have not got. dimensions of language diagrammatically as two axes, the syntagmatie and the paradigmat 5 i words to link together on the paradigmatic ax ship a given sign has with those with wich it combined 6 the syntagmatic axis is evident in any given sentence, any instance of parole. But itis, at the same time, related to all those other signs in the system that is langue which could have taken its place but did not. It might now appear open to the linguist to concentrate either on parole, deriving statistical statements about frequency of occurrence, or to concentrate on the underlying system; however, it is fairly obvious that the two studies ‘must be interdependent. Itis not possible to make any important claims aboyt a linguistic item derived from a frequency study without considering its place within the system, because the frequency of one item's occurrence can only have any significance when compared to the frequency of others in the system. And the system itself is only accessible through the study of instances of its realization, through parole. ‘Saussure’s linguistic theory had a profound influence on the linguists of the Prague School (see FUNCTIONALIST LINGUISTICS), the Copenhagen School (see GLOSSEMATICS), and the London School (see SCALE AND CATEGORY‘The linguistics encyclopedia 590 GRAMMAR, SYSTEMIC GRAMMAR and FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR), and the ‘emphasis on the structure of the language system has remained a powerful influence on ‘most linguistic theories after Saussure. In addition, structuralism in general and Saussure's insights about language in particular have profoundly influenced twentieth- ‘century literary and social criticism. Both of these disciplines have taken very seriously the siructuralist position that sign systems are shared, social phenomena, not provided but constructed by a community, and the concomitant notion that they might have been otherwise than they are—and that not every system is structured like every other system, Itis evident that the signs of different languages do not correspond to each other in 2 one~ to-one relationship: but if every sign in a system derives its values from its difference from the other signs in that system, then it follows that the values of the signs in one system cannot correspond to those of the signs in another system. And since sign systems do change over time, it follows, for example, that the significance of works of literature must be reassessed—will inevitably be reinterpreted—with each successive generation, or even with each successive reading. Considerations of this nature have influenced, for instance, critics who have reacted against the realist critical tradition, including writers such as Barthes, Lacan, Althusser, and Derrida (see further Belsey, 1980) KM. SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Lepschy, G.C. (1982), A Survey of Structural Linguistics, London, André Deutsch ‘Saussure, F.de (1916/74), Cours de ingulstique générate Lausanne; translated as Course in General Linguistics, Glasgow. Fontana/Coltin,