Structuralism

Structuralism is interested in the underlying structure (i.e., the patterns, forms, etc) of a category (e.g., a literary genre). Rather than focusing on individual instances, it is interested in finding the system that binds together those instances into a larger group. Less a field of study in and of itself, it is an approach, a means of uncovering order that can be used in many different fields of study.

It is about finding the invisible world underneath the visible one (think about Plato's Allegory of the Cave and The Matrix from Chapter 2').

Origins of Structuralism

The linguistic theories of Swiss academic Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) form the foundations of structuralist criticism. After his death, students (Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye) used their notes from linguistic courses Saussure taught between 1907 and 1911 to publish Course in General Linguistics (1916).

It is difficult to understate how much this book shaped modern linguistics and many other areas, including literary theory. Structuralists use semiotic theory (the study of signs): rather than studying language as a history of changes, Saussure and those that followed looked at language as a structure governed by a set of rules.

As Lois Tyson points out in her textbook, Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide (3rd edition, 2015), Structuralism holds that "the order we see in the world is the order we impose on it” (Tyson 199).

Realted Materials

• From Saussure's Course in General Linguistics.
  • If you are interested in reading the whole book, it is available online here.
• Here are some useful visual presentations of Saussure's work:
  • Overview from Columbia University
  • YouTube Video Presentation on Saussure

Structural Linguistics

What is a Structure?

• Surface vs. Structure: Surface phenomena the instances (e.g. individual words); structure is how they fit together (e.g. parts of speech and rules of combination)
• Wholeness, transformation, and self-regulation: Together these three elements make a structure.
  • Wholeness: the system functions as a unit
  • Transformation: the system changes over time: it is dynamic, not static
  • Self-Regulation: although a system will undergo transformations, those changes never go beyond the structural system. They still belong to the system and follow its foundational rules.

  Key Concepts from Ferdinand de Saussure

  (See Saussure's Course in General Linguistics)
  • "The Scientific Study of Languages": Saussure sees this as a major development in the study of linguistics. Think about how borrowing from the concept of the sciences (think of the scientific method, etc) fits into his argument for uncovering the invisible structures of language. (Saussure. 28 October 1910)
  • Social Product: "By distinguishing thus between the language and the faculty of language, we see that the language is what we may call a 'product': it is a 'social product'; .... Language, in turn, is quite independent of the individual; it cannot be a creation of the individual, it is essential socially, it presupposes the collectivity" (4 November 1910).
  • Language (langue) vs speech (parole)
    • Language/langue: This is syntax, phonology (system of sounds, especially for a language), a system of signs shared by a speech community. In other words, "the 'system of signs' that make up a particular language. This includes vocabulary, grammatical rules, and common expressions" (Stevens 138).
    • Speech/parole: "the infinite number of acts of speaking by individual speakers of a language" (Stevens 138). Think about the language quirks you and others have as individuals. This is language in action.
  • Sign = Signifier + Signified (4 July 1911)
    • Signifier: the word itself; the letters you write or the sounds you make when saying this word
    • Signified: "meaning" of the word: this is the ideal (you may want to think a little bit about Platonic ideals here) meant: it is the concept or object you mean when you say the word/signifier
      • This is not exactly the same as the referent, which is the actual thing, not the concept. It is your specific cat Fido, not the concept of a cat.
    • Sign: how the word and meaning combine together.
      • "Signifier and Signified are inextricably linked, like two sides of a sheet of paper; you can't separate them. That is, for an English speaker the word tree brings to mind the image of a tree, and seeing a tree brings to mind the word tree. We view the world through the words available to us" (Stevens 138).
    • "The arbitrary nature of the sign": "There is no necessary connection between signifier and signified . . . . This is why different languages have different words for the same concept (tree vs. arbor) and even different words for animal noises . . .. . Additionally, the way concepts divide the world up is also arbitrary: . .. Different languages conceive of time, familial relations, and other matters differently" (Stevens 139).
    • Value: "The value of a sign comes from its relation to other signs in the language system" (Stevens 139).
    • Paradigm and Syntagm: Saussure describes these as the two axes (i.e. as in x or y-axis on a graph) of language.
      • Syntagms: "These are two or more consecutive units within a language. . .. Saussure's point about syntagms is that there is no clear border between what belongs to language as a collective structure and what is the creation of an individual speaker" (Stevens 139, 140).Think of this as the x-axis of a sentence: is the units and order the words come in. This can also be the sounds within a word and the order in which they come. When you change the order, you change the meaning.
      • Paradigm: this is a grouping of signifiers or signified, which share a defining quality. You can often replace members of a linguistic paradigm with one another and the sentence (the syntagm part of this) would still make sense.
        • For example, if I ask you to fill in the blank, a group of words will come to mind that you associate with one another that because of all the linguistic structures you know would make sense in that blank.
          • The child ate an ______.
        • FYI this term will show up in other theories but with slightly different definitions.
        • This YouTube video, Saussure and Structural Linguistics," gives a good illustration of this at the 3-minute mark.
      • Difference (in French): how we identify something is based on what it is not. "Up" is not "down," for example, and "tall" is relative to what you think is "short."
        • These differences are based around binary oppositions
          • See Lévi-Strauss and Structuralist Anthropology FMI
        • Synchronic linguistics
          • Diachronic vs Synchronic: a linguistic approach that looks at how language changes over time is referred to as diachronic; Saussure looked at a system of relationship between words and how this collectively creates meaning at one point in time, which is referred to as synchronic.
            • Diachrony is also referred to as "Historical Linguistics"