Structural Linguistics, Structuralism, and Semiotics

……replace the “diachronic” study of language through time, the study of the development of language, with the
“synchronic” study of the particular formation of language at a particular moment.

…Saussure…language as well—is “a form, not a substance.”

234
… “structural” linguistics suggests that the nature of linguistic elements is relational…

… “it is the viewpoint that creates the object” of linguistic science.

…assumes the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign. Since the relationships rather than the “elements” of a
system of language are crucial, all the elements of language could be different from what they are.

…language takes whatever material is at hand to create its meanings…

Formal relationships are simultaneous rather than sequential…

…meaning is more readily apprehended and analyzed through visual models rather than narrative discourse.
(Both Kristeva an Marin in this section make this clear).

… double nature of language…

…signified and a signifier…

…both in speech (parole) and in the system (the order or structure of its code), language as a system (la langue).

… “the absolutely final law of language is, we dare say, that there is nothing which can ever reside in one term,
as a direct consequence of the fact that linguistic symbols are unrelated to what they should designate.”

…Saussure… calls “semiology.”…Peirce… called “semiotics.”

… “the codes by which people make reality significant” that Marin describes in his semiotic analysis of
Disneyland.

Shklovsky… isolate the formal “devices” that create the effects he finds in literature..

…even Northrop Frye calls for a kind of systematic and scientific study…

235
…the semiotic or structural study of myth and culture—has been the lifework of the foremost practitioner of
structuralism in western Europe, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.

…the way linguistics analyzes sentences, structural anthropology—as he calls it—can analyze communal
narrative discourse.

…highest scientific ambition of structuralism and semiotics.

…French structuralism of the 1960s and early 1970s has proved to be a watershed in modern criticism, causing a
major reorientation in literary studies.

…the supposed detachment of such an investigation appeared to be offensively antihumanistic…

…Kroeber… “structure” is a redundant concept that needs no articulation…

…transformed, almost immediately in the United States, into simply a step or stage in a host of critical and
cultural programs that can be called “post-structural.”

236
Julia Kristeva… semiotics requires the “and/or” of a science that also creates the possibility of a critique of
science.

…modern criticism has become an interdisciplinary phenomenon.