2. Structural Approach to Language. Language and Speech Units.

Structural linguistics was established in the 1920’s and 1930’s as an approach distinct from that of the neogrammarian school, which predominated in the late 19th century and focused exclusively on the history of linguistic elements. Structural linguistics was also distinct from traditional descriptive grammar, with its flexible concepts and its bias in favor of describing all languages, whatever their structure, with the grammatical formulations of Latin and the European languages. Structural linguistics emerged from the quest for a more consistent system of linguistic concepts and for methods that could be as rigorously applied to the synchronic description of modern languages as the comparative method was applied to comparative linguistics.

The first attempt to describe a language with exactitude was made by the ancient Indian scholar Panini (fifth-fourth centuries B.C). In the Middle Ages, similar attempts resulted in the formulation of a universal rational grammar, the Port-Royal grammar, and in the philosophical and linguistic works of Descartes and Leibniz. The development of structural linguistics was considerably influenced by I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay, F. F. Fortuna-tov, E. Sapir, and L. Bloomfield and particularly by F. de Saussure and the work of the Linguistic Circle of Moscow, founded in 1915.

From the 1920’s to the 1940’s, the Prague, Copenhagen, and American schools further developed the concepts and methodology of structural linguistics. However, important contributions to structural linguistic theory were also made by such scholars as A. Martinet, E. Benveniste, A. W. de Groot, J. Kuryłowicz, and A. Sommerfelt, who did not belong to any school. The concepts of a structural approach to the description of language, first formulated as a theory based on phonological material, were developed by N. S. Trubetskoi, R. Jakobson, E. D. Polivanov, and the Czech members of the Linguistic Circle of Prague.

During the first stage in the development of structural linguistics, which lasted approximately until the 1950’s, the school’s theoreticians devoted considerable, and sometimes exclusive, attention to the formal description of language. They ignored the content of language and asserted that a linguistic system should be mathematically precise and regular. As a consequence, structural linguistics came under attack by both its opponents and its adherents. During the 1950’s, the investigation of linguistic meaning and the elaboration of such structural methods for describing meaning as componential analysis, generative semantics, and interpretative semantics developed intensively. The concepts and methodology of structural linguistics have been used in the comparative studies of Jakobson, Martinet, H. Hoenigswald, and P. Kiparsky on diachronic phonology.

As of the 1970’s, structural linguistics is apparently disappearing as a distinct school. The research methods developed for structural linguistics are used in conjunction with other methods in such linguistic disciplines as psycholinguistics and sociolinguis-tics. Structural linguistics has also influenced the development of structurally oriented research methods in such other areas of the humanities as literary theory and criticism, anthropology, ethnology, and sociology.

Language and speech

Hierarchically arranged

Language-phoneme=>morpheme=>lexeme=>word combination=>sentense=>text

Speech- sound=>morph=>word=>word combination=>utterance=>discourse

System and strusture.

System implies the characterization of a complex object as made up of separate parts/ Systems of sounds ect.

Structure means hierarchial layering of parts in constituting the whole/ Language is regarded as a structural system. Each level of the language has its own system. Therefore language is regarded as a system of systems/

The level units are built up in the same way and that's why the unit of a lower level serve the building material for the units of a higher level

Isomorphism- likeiness and similarity of linguistic units.

Moscow linguistic circle 1915

Трубецкой. He cre8ed a theory binar opposition.

He wrote the foundation of phonology. Opposition is a functionally relevant relationship of partial differences between partially similar elements. The distinctive feature points out the marked member of the opposition from the unmarked one.

student- student|'s| - the element is marked.

This theory can by applied to the other units of language. The distinction between marked and unmarked elements can be neutralised when the unmarked element signifies what's meant by the marked element. I hear you coming / I've heard you coming.- neutral as hear - common meaning.

Opposition theory can be applies to all demains of linguistics, but that's espesially suitable for the description of the morphologilac categories. Binary relations are especially evident on the morphological level, which better reflects the structural organisation of a particular language.