7.1.1 Language as a system of signs
The one who is generally credited with the approach known as structural-ismis the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). The outlines of his approach appeared in 1916 under the title Cours de linguistique générale (‘Course of general linguistics’), a compilation of material from lectures Saussure held around the year 1910.
To Saussure, a language is an abstract complex system of relations and rules that underlies all regularities to be observed in actual language use.
The system is formed by signs which are related in multiple ways. A sign, e.g. a word, consists of two parts. One part is its sound form. The other part is its meaning. The association between form and meaning of a sign is fixed by conventions of language use. The association is arbitrary, i.e. a word could as well have a different meaning, and the meaning could be associated with a different expression – provided the conventions of the language were different. Saussure emphasizes that the sign and its parts are real entities in the minds of the speakers, mental or cognitive entities in modern terminology.
What distinguishes the structuralist approach is the method of analysis and the resulting concept of linguistic signs. Saussure argues that language is to be studied exclusively ‘from within’. The language system is a very complex structure formed by units at different levels: single sounds, syllables, words, syntactic phrases, sentences. Each unit is related to the smaller units it consists of and to the larger units it is a part of, and also to all sorts of other units which are similar in some respect or other. A sign constitutes a sign only as part of a system – only insofar as it is related to, and different from, the other signs of the language. This holds for both the form and the meaning of a sign. Form and meaning are only defined
‘negatively’, i.e. by differing in specific ways from the other signs. They have no positively defined ‘substance’. Neither the form nor the meaning of a sign could exist independently of the language system it belongs to.
Let me illustrate these abstract considerations with a concrete example.
The French word rouge, standard pronunciation [ʁu],1 means red. Its sound form is a string of three sound units (phonemes), /r/, /u/ and //, for which there are certain conventions of articulation. Each of the
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phonemes allows for considerable phonetic variation; /r/, for example is usually pronounced [ʁ]; but it can also be pronounced as in Italian (rolled [r]) or even as the [x] in German Buch. As long as it can be distinguished from the other sounds of French, in particular /l/, its actual articulation may vary.
Japanese /r/ can even be pronounced [l] because Japanese does not have two phonemes /l/ and /r/ but just one of this type (so-called liquids). Thus, Saussure argues, a sound unit of the system is not primarily defined by its articulation or acoustic quality but by its relation to the other sound units.
The other component of the sign, the meaning of French rouge, is similar to the meaning of English red or German rot (but see the next chapter for other languages). The exact range of colours that the word denotes depends on which other colour terms compete with rouge: orange (orange), rose (pink), violet (purple) and brun (brown). If, for example, French lacked a term for purple, the respective range of colours would be divided between the words for red, brown and blue, resulting in an extension of the range of rouge. A sign, according to structuralism, is constituted by being dif-ferent from the other signs of the system. Its form and its meaning are the sum of their differences and relations to the other forms and meanings of the system.
The structuralist notion of meaning is thus radically relational. Strictly speaking, it implies that we cannot determine the meaning of a lexeme independently, but only its relations to the meanings of other lexemes. This notion of meaning is not commonly accepted. While it has been adopted by some semanticists (e.g. in Cruse, 1986), alternative theories have been developed, in particular cognitive semantics (Chapter 9). The cognitive approach does view the meaning of a lexeme as something that can in principle be investigated and described independently. According to this theory, meanings are considered integral parts not of a system of linguistic meanings but of our overall cognitive system, which can be studied by the methods of cognitive psychology.
In terms of the semiotic triangle structuralism focuses exclusively on the left side of the schema (Figure 7.1). Semantics is not a matter of reference
Figure 7.1 The focus of structuralist semantics expression
denotation meaning determines
means
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and denotation. Rather, it concerns the sign, i.e. a pair of form and meaning, and how it is related to other signs.
7.1.2 Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations
All linguistic units – sounds, syllables, words, phrases, sentences – can be combined into more complex units. In the original terminology of structuralism, such a complex is called a syntagm (from ancient Greek syntagma, compound). A syllable is a syntagm of phonemes, a word taken as a sound unit is a syntagm of syllables; as a semantic unit, a word may be a syntagm of morphemes (e.g., un-natur-al, see 7.2.1); a syntactic phrase like the NP a lucky decision is a syntagm of words, a sentence is a syntagm of phrases. For each kind of syntagm there are specific formation rules and within each syntagm the constituents are related to each other in specific ways. The general term for the relations within a syntagm is syntagmatic relations. The syntagmatic relations that a given unit bears to other con-stituents are determined by its combinatorial properties. For example, an English NP may take the form article+noun but not noun+
article. Thus English articles have the combinatorial property of preceding the noun in an NP. Let us consider the syllable /set/ as an example (Figure 7.2). The syllable is a syntagm of three phonemes /s/, /e/ and /t/, that occupy the three basic positions of a syllable, commonly called onset, nucleus and coda. The syntagmatic relations are first of all those of order:
the onset precedes the nucleus and the nucleus precedes the coda. In addition, nucleus and coda form a unit within the syllable, the so-called rhyme. Therefore the relation that holds between nucleus and coda is closer than, and different from, the relation between nucleus and onset.
For each position we can determine which units can occur in this position. The set of all alternatives is called a paradigm2 (from ancient Greek paradeigma, something shown side by side). The onset position of the syllable /set/ can be filled by certain, but not all consonant phonemes (for example /ŋ/, the last sound of sing is not possible here) and by certain consonant clusters such as /fr/, which we will disregard here. The nucleus position defines a paradigm that consists of all vowel and diphthong phonemes. The coda paradigm consists of all consonant phonemes that can occur in syllable-final position (excluding, for example, /h/, /y/ and /w/).
Figure 7.2 Three paradigms defined by the syntagm /set/
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The units within a paradigm exhibit relations of difference and similarity.
These are called paradigmatic relations. For example, the opposition voiced vs voiceless distinguishes /b/ and /p/ within the onset paradigm.
Let us call the corresponding properties of the units, e.g. voice (being voiced), their contrastive properties.
Table 7.2 displays the basic structuralist concepts. They allow the defini-tion of basic nodefini-tions such as syntactic category (a paradigm of syntactic units), word class or grammatical category (a paradigm of lexical units, 3.1) or lexeme (a unit with certain paradigmatic and syntagmatic properties).