Manuel Alejandro Ramos Sierra

18 DE AGOSTO DE 2020
Structuralism VS. cOGNITIVISM
01163603
Introduction

As we all know Ferdinand de Saussure was de father of the linguistic, he

makes several researches to understand how the language works, the
structure, segments, and other stuff. With him we developed the 4 schools of
language.

We are going to focus on two on this essay, the structuralism, and the
cognitivism. I decided to compare this two schools so we can notice all the
things that have in common and the thigs that are different on each other. And
maybe put some contributions of other people like Chomsky or Skinner.
 Manuel Alejandro Ramos Sierra
18 DE AGOSTO DE 2020
Structuralism VS. cOGNITIVISM
01163603

Structuralism is an intellectual movement to the human sciences with a

profound effect on linguistics, sociology, and other fields as well as philosophy
which tries to analyze a specific field as a sophisticated system of interrelated
parts. Structuralism believes that all human activity and its products are
constructed and not natural. It also holds that everything has meaning.

It comes from a work of linguistic of Ferdinand de Saussure, who

developed a branch of linguistics called “Structural Linguistics”; basically, what
structuralism means is that words ere used to refer to things or to mental
images of things.

Structuralism focuses on everything that is theorical and methodical that

stands that every sociocultural system exists with a series of structures which
determines everything that occurs in that system. We can summarize 3 main
ideas to explain this school.

1. All system is compost by structures: an structure is a way to

organize parts of everything, including all their relations. For
structuralism, these ways to organize are what make sense in the
whole human activity.
2. This structure determines the position that needs each element:
from the previous point we can rescue that all human activity; as
well as their functions, are constructions; due to they are mediated
by symbols.
3. The structures are what we found down of what we perceived: in
other words; structuralism as an interpretative methods tries to
pay attention to the internal structures of cultural elements, or
rather try to understand the structures that delimit or make
possible the existence of these elements.

Now, on the other hand we have cognitivism which is a discipline that

tries to account for linguistic knowledge by relating it to other cognitive
processes of the human mind, such as perception, memory, attention, etc.
 Manuel Alejandro Ramos Sierra
18 DE AGOSTO DE 2020
Structuralism VS. cOGNITIVISM
01163603
According to this theory their current approaches, languages codes and
structures are learned, stored in memory and recovered in much the same way
as other types of knowledge that humans possess. In other words, this means
that language acquisition follows the same learning patterns as other complex
cognitive abilities.

In the learning of second languages, these theories have had a great

influence on the understanding of how new language skills are integrated. In
this way; learning results in a series of successive stages, involving
restructuring of previous stages.

With that being said, and understanding each school of linguistic we are
going to explain some of the differences and similarities that each one has in a
little Venn´s Diagram

Structuralism Similarities
Cognitivism
Describes Transforms
fenomenoms Says that we
linguistic into a
humans born
Helps us to science by
with the ability
produce the giving an object
of language
message of study
 Manuel Alejandro Ramos Sierra
18 DE AGOSTO DE 2020
Structuralism VS. cOGNITIVISM
01163603
Conclusion

I made the decision to talk about structuralism because of its

contributions like the attention to the variations that a language may experience
over an extended period of time, focus on describing a language concretely at a
certain point in time, mainly its interest in linguistic tuning and diachrony.

Cognitivism and its predecessor schools that have traditionally studied

the formal aspects of structuralism and generativism in turn make the reference
to neurolinguistic, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic aspects and
anthropolinguistic which enable the function of language as a tool of cognition,
representation, communication and interaction between individuals.
 Manuel Alejandro Ramos Sierra
18 DE AGOSTO DE 2020
Structuralism VS. cOGNITIVISM
01163603
References

Cervantes, C. C. V. (1997). CVC. Diccionario de términos clave de ELE.

Lingüística cognitiva.
https://cvc.cervantes.es/ensenanza/biblioteca_ele/diccio_ele/diccionario/
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NLvWjc09Xxvn1qHlo6WBVaR8

Guzmán Martínez, G. (2020). Estructuralismo: qué es y cuáles son sus ideas

clave. Psicología y Mente.
https://psicologiaymente.com/social/estructuralismo?
fbclid=IwAR16feFGFeu_ZX3W4KuLOC1vnwgMH3gYBGfqyt-mxyKR-s-
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William, J. (s. f.). structuralism. Recuperado 18 de agosto de 2020, de

https://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/structuralism.htm?
fbclid=IwAR0oFcbovUujg7RKVv_WGXOPWgRxLywtAnssihdZBy83m73Ij
2J7HZOglgA