ENG 221 AN INTRODUCTION TO SYNTACTIC MODELS
them. He envisaged langage (human speech as a whole) to be composed of two aspects, which he called langue (the language system) and parole (the act of speaking). Briefly, the division is as follows. Langage is that
faculty of human speech present in all normal human beings due to heredity, but which requires the correct environmental stimuli for proper
development. Langue was considered by Saussure to be the totality (the
‘collective fact’, as he put it) of a language, deducible from an
examination of the memories of all the language users. It was a storehouse: ‘the sum of word-images stored in the minds of individuals’.
The idea is very similar in principle to the notion of competence as later
defined by Chomsky, though it differs in its cumulative emphasis.
Ultimately, langue has to be related to the actual usage of individuals.
This leads to parole, the actual, concrete act of speaking on the part of an individual. It is a personal, dynamic, social activity, which exists at a
particular time and place and in a particular situation – as opposed to langue, which exists apart from any particular manifestation in speech.
Parole is, of course, the only object available for direct observation by the linguist. It is identical with the Chomskyan notion of performance.
Making a conceptual distinction of this kind is certainly an aid to clear
thinking on the subject of language, and linguistics as a whole has
benefited. The two concepts have also been modified over the years, as
different schools of thought have taken them up and built further
conceptual structures on their basis.
In summary, structural grammar is empirical; it makes exactness a methodological requirement and insists that all definitions be publicly
verifiable or refutable. It examines all language in terms of their
phonological and grammatical systems, which can be determined by
empirical methods. Because its description is structural, the uniqueness of each language is recognized and done justice; but it also facilitates
comparison, since the method also reveals what languages have in
common. It describes the minimum required contrasts that underlie any
construction or conceivable use of a language and not just those
discoverable in some particular use.
ENG 221 AN INTRODUCTION TO SYNTACTIC MODELS
1. (a) A child won the prize
(b) The prize was won by a child
Although 1(b) is a variant of 1(a), structural grammars would treat this variant as a different form. Capable treatment of such sentence variants was produced only by a further grammatical approach, the transformational – generative grammar.
In principle, the item-and-arrangement model of structural grammar can
provide a comprehensive description of any language. Phones are classified into phonemes. These basic units are arranged to form words.
Once words are described, it is a simple matter, in principle, to state the
rules for arranging words to form sentences. This is the structuralist stand. But when you start to do the description you will discover that it
is no simple matter. In practice, the variety of sentence patterns occurring in any language has seemed to defy exhaustive description.
Recourse to introspection or to the notion of the mind (or intuition) was rejected by structuralists based on the notion of verifiability. To them, the sole proper object of study was thought to be a corpus of utterances;
it was held that linguistics had the purpose of providing procedures for
cutting up the utterances, and for grouping together the resulting segments. The classes and categories which were set up in the process of
these operations were considered to be scientific constructs, conceptual fiction which were useful in the course of the description, but did not correspond to any psychological reality. Thus, structural grammar prescinds from psychological factors that are important to all speakers.
One of the most obvious casualties in this approach was semantic study.
Semantics was traditionally the section of linguistics in which the least
degree of precision had been reached, and in which recourse to
‘mentalist’ notions appeared to be the least dispensable. Consequently,
an attempt was made to achieve linguistic description without considering meaning. The attempt to eliminate meaning was made not
only in the field of phonology and morphology, but even in the field of
semantics itself! In their situational description of meaning, the assumption that the ‘relevant’ linguistic facts can be correlated with the
‘relevant’ non-linguistic items in a completely objective manner has concealed many non-linguistic assumptions.
Some of the problems connected with the treatment of the morpheme
depended on the way the notion of meaning was employed. The definition of the morpheme as a minimum meaningful unit was in many
ways misleading. Besides, lacking a workable method to deal with meaning, a confusing use of terms like ‘zero’ elements and of
‘portmanteau’ morphs was introduced. In, for example, cats two
ENG 221 AN INTRODUCTION TO SYNTACTIC MODELS
morphemes were identified: cat, meaning ‘cat’, and –s, meaning
‘plural’. The way in which cat also meant ‘singular’ was not very
clearly explained, and the same analysis was imposed on languages for
which it was intuitively less satisfactory. Artificial solutions were suggested for cases like foot, feet or sing, sang to make them match mechanically the cases cat, cats and love, loved.
Structural grammar has not produced any complete grammars comparable to the exhaustive treatments by traditional methods, concentrating on critical studies of how grammars should be written, partial sketches of exotic languages, and partial structural analysis of familiar languages. Structural grammar devotes attention to surface structures and has no regard for deep structure. For many linguists,
structural grammar’s goal is the description of language, and not its
explanation. In attempts to comprehend language, structural grammar does not enjoy the attention of modern scholars, but anyone concerned with the facts of language finds it useful.
4.0 CONCLUSION
We have tried in this unit to point out some of the strengths and
weaknesses of structural grammars. It must be mentioned that this
discussion of strengths and weaknesses by no means applies to the work
of individual linguists, since they are stated in extreme fashion.
The
strengths are those claimed by structuralists, and the weaknesses are those pointed out by representatives of the opposing views.
5.0 SUMMARY
You have learnt in this unit:
• the strengths of structural grammar, and
• the weaknesses of structural grammar
6.0 TUTOR-MARKED ASSIGNMENT
1. Mention and discuss three areas where structuralist principles and methods are still employed in the analysis of language.
2. Mention any two weaknesses of structural grammar and discuss their effects on linguistic analysis
ENG 221 AN INTRODUCTION TO SYNTACTIC MODELS
7.0 REFERENCES/FURTHER READINGS
Clark, V.P., P. A. Eschholz and A. F. Rosa (Eds). (1981). Language:
Introductory Readings. New York: St. Martins Press.
Crane, L. B., E. Yeager and R. L. Whitman. (1981). An Introduction to Linguistics. Boston: Little, Brown and Company
Crystal, D. (1971). Linguistics. Middlesex, England: Penguin
Dinneen, F. P. (1967). An Introduction to General Linguistics. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Lepschy, G. C. (1972). A Survey of Structural Linguistics. London:
Faber and Faber.
ENG 221 AN INTRODUCTION TO SYNTACTIC MODELS