Structuralism and
Saussure
Structuralism originated in the early 1900s
in the structural linguistics of
Ferdinand de Saussure.
袁卓喜
秦海涛
（)
Structuralism is a theoretical paradigm
emphasizing that elements of culture
must be understood in terms of their
relationship to a larger,
overarching(comprehensive) system or
structure. "
Alternately, as summarized by
philosopher Simon Blackburn,
Structuralism is "the belief that
phenomena of human life are not
intelligible except through their
interrelations. These relations constitute
a structure, and behind local variations in
the surface phenomena there are
constant laws of abstract culture.
Structuralism as a philosophical stance
Structuralists are interested in the interrelationship between
UNITS ( also called "surface phenomena," )
and RULES (the ways that units can be put together. )
In language: units are words and the rules which are the forms of
grammar which order words. In different languages, the grammar rules are
different, as are the words, but the structure is still the same in all languages:
words are put together within a grammatical system to make meaning.
an example of this using literature
Three characters:
princess, stepmother, and prince
a princess is persecuted by a stepmother
and rescued (and married) by a prince
Cinderella
“units” are:princess, stepmother, and prince
"rules" are: stepmothers are evil, princesses
are victims, and princes and princesses
have to marry.
that's exactly what structuralist analyses of
literature are analyzing.
In brief, de Saussure's structural
linguistics propounded three related
concepts.
De Saussure argued for a distinction
between langue (an idealized
abstraction of language) and parole
(language as actually used in daily life).
He argued that the "sign" was
composed of both a signified, an
abstract concept or idea, and a
"signifier", the perceived sound/visual
image.
Saussure argued that linguistic signs
were composed of two parts:
a "signifier" (the "sound pattern" of a
word, either in mental projection—as
when one silently recites lines from a
poem to one's self—or in actual,
physical realization as part of a speech
act)
a "signified" (the concept or meaning of
the word)
Because different languages have
different words to describe the same
objects or concepts, there is no intrinsic
reason why a specific sign is used to
express a given signifier. It is thus
"arbitrary".
Signs thus gain their meaning from
their relationships and contrasts with
other signs. As he wrote, "in language,
there are only differences 'without
positive terms.'"
Structuralist notions on units and rules
Structuralists believe that the underlying structures
which organize units and rules into meaningful
systems are generated by the human mind itself, and
not by sense perception.
As such, the mind is itself a structuring mechanism
which looks through units and files them according to
rules.
So structuralism sees itself as a science of humankind,
and works to uncover all the structures that underlie
all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and
feel
Structuralist analysis posits these systems
as universal
Every human mind in every culture at every point in
history has used some sort of structuring principle to
organize and understand cultural phenomena.
Every human culture has some sort of language,
which has the basic structure of all language:
words/phonemes are combined according to a
grammar of rules to produce meaning.
Every human culture similarly has some sort of social
organization
All of these organizations are governed, according to
structuralist analyses, by structures which are
universal.
A more formal definition:
a structure is any conceptual system that has the following
three properties:
Wholeness. This means that the system functions as a whole,
not just as a collection of independent parts.
Transformation. This means that the system is not static, but
capable of change. New units can enter the system, but when
they do they're governed by the rules of the system.
Self-Regulation. This is related to the idea of transformation.
You can add elements to the system, but you can't change the
basic structure of the system no matter what you add to it. The
transformations of a system never lead to anything outside the
system.
Saussure’ideas on linguistics
I: THE NATURE OF THE LINGUISTIC SIGN
Language is based on a NAMING process, by which things get
associated with a word or name.
The linguistic SIGN (a key word) is made of the union of
a concept and a sound image. A more common way to define a
linguistic SIGN is that a SIGN is the combination of a SIGNIFIER
and a SIGNIFIED. Saussure says the sound image is the
SIGNIFIER and the concept the SIGNIFIED.
This was quite different from previous
approaches that focused on the
relationship between words and the
things in the world that they designate.
Other key notions in structural linguistics
include paradigm, syntagm, and value
The SIGN, as union of a SIGNIFIER and a SIGNIFIED, has two main
characteristics.
The SIGN, as union of a SIGNIFIER and a
SIGNIFIED, has two main characteristics.
This principle dominates all ideas about the
STRUCTURE of language. It makes it possible to
separate the signifier and signified, or to change the
relation between them.
The second characteristic of the SIGN is that
the signifier exists in TIME, and that time can be
measured as LINEAR‫تخطيطى او طولى‬.
II: LINGUISTIC VALUE
Thought is a shapeless mass, which is only ordered by
language. One of the questions philosophers have
puzzled over for centuries is whether ideas can exist at
all without language. No ideas preexist language;
language itself gives shape to ideas and makes them
expressible.
The VALUE of a sign is determined, however, not by
what signifiers get linked to what particular signifieds,
but rather by the whole system of signs used within a
community. VALUE is the product of a system or
structure (LANGUE), not the result of individual
relations (PAROLE).
III.SYNTAGMATIC AND ASSOCIATIVE RELATIONS
The most important kind of relation between units in a signifying system, is a
SYNTAGMATIC relation. This means, basically, a LINEAR relation. In spoken
or written language, words come out one by one .Because language is linear,
it forms a chain, by which one unit is linked to the next.
An example “”The cat sat on the mat””
“” The mat sat on the cat “”
English word order :SVO
Japanese word order:SOV etc.
SYNTAGMS
Combinations or relations formed by position within a
chain are called SYNTAGMS.
The terms within a syntagm acquire VALUE only
because they stand in opposition to everything before
or after them. Each term IS something because it is
NOT something else in the sequence.
SYNTAGMATIC relations are most crucial in written
and spoken language, in DISCOURSE, where the
ideas of time, linearity, and syntactical meaning are
important.
ASSOCIATIVE
Signs are stored in your memory, for example, not in syntagmatic
links or sentences, but in ASSOCIATIVE groups.
"Education"
"-tion":education, relation, association
Similar associations: education, teacher, textbook, college,
expensive.
Random set of linkages: education, baseball, computer games,
psychoanalysis
ASSOCIATIVE relations are only in your head, not in the
structure of language itself, whereas SYNTAGMATIC relations
are a product of linguistic structure.
Structuralism in literary theory and criticism
In literary theory, structuralist criticism
relates literary texts to a larger structure,
which may be a particular genre, a range of
intertextual connections, a model of a
universal narrative structure, or a system of
recurrent patterns or motifs.[12]
Structuralism argues that there must be
a structure in every text, which explains
why it is easier for experienced readers
than for non-experienced readers to
interpret a text. Hence, everything that
is written seems to be governed by
specific rules, or a "grammar of
literature", that one learns in
educational institutions and that are to
be unmasked.
A potential problem of structuralist interpretation
is that it can be highly reductive, as scholar
Catherine Belsey puts it: "the structuralist danger
of collapsing all difference."An example of such a
reading might be if a student concludes the
authors of West Side Story did not write anything
"really" new, because their work has the same
structure as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In
both texts a girl and a boy fall in love (a
"formula" with a symbolic operator between them
would be "Boy + Girl") despite the fact that they
belong to two groups that hate each other
("Boy's Group - Girl's Group" or "Opposing
forces") and conflict is resolved by their death
Structuralist readings focus on how the
structures of the single text resolve
inherent narrative tensions. If a
structuralist reading focuses on multiple
texts, there must be some way in which
those texts unify themselves into a
coherent system.
The versatility of structuralism is such that a
literary critic could make the same claim about
a story of two friendly families ("Boy's Family
+ Girl's Family") that arrange a marriage
between their children despite the fact that
the children hate each other ("Boy - Girl") and
then the children commit suicide to escape the
arranged marriage; the justification is that the
second story's structure is an 'inversion' of the
first story's structure: the relationship between
the values of love and the two pairs of parties
involved have been reversed.
Structuralistic literary criticism argues that
the "literary banter of a text" can lie only in
new structure, rather than in the specifics
of character development and voice in
which that structure is expressed. Literary
structuralism often follows the lead of
Vladimir Propp, Algirdas Julien Greimas,
and Claude Lévi-Strauss in seeking out
basic deep elements in stories, myths, and
more recently, anecdotes, which are
combined in various ways to produce the
many versions of the ur-story or ur-myth.
There is considerable similarity between
structural literary theory and Northrop
Frye's archetypal criticism, which is also
indebted to the anthropological study of
myths. Some critics have also tried to
apply the theory to individual works, but
the effort to find unique structures in
individual literary works runs counter to
the structuralist program and has an
affinity with New Criticism.
Conclusion: Saussure's structuralism is
based upon three assumptions
the systematic nature of language, where the
whole is greater than the sum of its parts
the relational conception of the elements of
language, where linguistic "entities" are
defined in relationships of combination and
contrast to one another
the arbitrary nature of linguistic elements,
where they are defined in terms of the
function and purpose they serve rather than
in terms of their inherent qualities
Instructor/ Rehab Farouk
The end