Lingg 206: Grammatical Analysis I
Angelina A. Aquino
I. What is structuralism?
- Saussure: background and key concepts
II. European tradition
- Schools of linguistics: Geneva, Prague, Copenhagen
- Other works: Guillaume, Tesnière, Firth
III. American tradition
- Anthropology and linguistics: Boas, Sapir
- Bloomfield: background and key concepts
- Post-Bloomfieldian linguistics
IV. Applications to Philippine languages
Introductory videos
YouTube: Leiden University – Faculty of Humanities
Chapter 4.3: Structuralism, structure and identity
Chapter 4.4: Structuralism, language and world
“A thing’s identity is defined not by its intrinsic properties,
but by the larger structure that it is a part of.”
- 1857-1913, Swiss linguist
- studied and taught in Geneva, Leipzig, Berlin, and Paris
- father of semiotics and structuralism
- semiotics: study of signs and their use in communication
- structuralism: study of relationships among elements in a system
- best known for his “Course on General Linguistics”
- actually a compilation of lecture notes from his students
“Language is not a function of the speaker;
it is a product that is passively assimilated by the individual.”
“Language is a system of interdependent terms
in which the value of each term results solely from
the simultaneous presence of the others.”
- langue vs. parole
- sign = signified + signifier
- signs are arbitrary and differential
- negative knowledge (knowing what it is not)
- synchrony vs. diachrony
- syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic analysis
- organized into several schools of linguistics
- most notable: Geneva, Prague, Copenhagen
- independent works by French and British linguists
- subscribe to Saussure’s concept of language as structure
- frameworks spanning different areas of linguistics
- notable members:
- Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye
- “stylistics,” or technical notion of style
- intellectual and affective components of language
- difference between dictum (content) and modus (presentation)
- parole as “actualization” of “virtual” langue
- relationship between social and individual sides of language
- notable members:
- Vilém Mathesius, Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetzkoy
- phonology
- phonemes as differential units; distinctive-feature analysis
- theory of markedness
- presence or absence of features; extended to morphology, syntax
- linguistic typology and linguistic universals
- structural functionalism
- functions of language (Bühler): cognitive, expressive, instrumental
- expounded by Jakobson, Mathesius, Mukařovský
1. referential
2. poetic
3. emotive
4. conative
5. phatic
6. metalingual
- notable members:
- Louis Hjelmslev, Viggo Brøndal, Hans Jørgen Uldall
- glossematics
- language = content plane + expression plane
- glosseme as smallest meaningful unit
- language is not conveyed through sound
alone (multimodality)
- Gustave Guillaume
- cognitive system (tense, aspect, and mood) in verbs
- psychomechanics (dimensions of language) and word categorization
- Lucien Tesnière
- valency: arguments (subject, object, oblique) of predicate (verb)
- dependency grammar
- John Rupert Firth
- collocation: “You shall know a word by the company it keeps.”
- prosody: syntagmatic components of phonology
- initially founded on anthropological research
- notable figures: Franz Boas, Edward Sapir
- study of indigenous American languages
- Linguistic Society of America
- founded in 1924
- Bloomfieldian structural linguistics
- Leonard Bloomfield: linguistics as a scientific discipline
- Franz Boas
- father of modern anthropology
- published “On Alternating Sounds” (1889) and “Handbook of the
American Indian Languages” (1911)
- Edward Sapir
- classification of American indigenous languages (1929)
- development of the phoneme, distributional analysis
- different languages representing different social realities
- Benjamin Lee Whorf
“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language.”
- 1887-1949, American linguist
- initially studied German and Indo-European philology
- taught at Cincinnati, Illinois, Ohio State, Chicago, and Yale
- important writings include:
- “An Introduction to the Study of Language” (1914)
- “A Set of Postulates for the Science of Language” (1926)
- “Language” (1933)
- “An Introduction to the Study of Language” (1914)
- sentence as analysis of a thought or “total experience”
- Wundt: “analysis into its parts of something that exists as a whole in the
consciousness of the speaker”
- morphology
- existence of “imperfectly separable elements” (e.g. ‘fl-’ in flare, flash, flicker)
- inflection (categorical difference) and derivation (material difference)
- words as semantically independent and recurrent elements, whole concepts
- syntax
- binary groupings of predication and attribution
- cannot entirely be separated from morphology
- review of Saussure (1923)
- psychology is irrelevant to language study
- goal of linguistics: to present the ‘facts of language’ without an
account ‘in terms of mind’
- “Language” (1933)
- sentence as the ‘maximum construction of an utterance’,
a linguistic form which is not part of any larger linguistic form
- words as formally (no longer conceptually) independent elements
- system of “emic” units
lexical grammatical
pheneme phoneme taxeme - primitive feature
glosseme morpheme tagmeme - smallest meaningful unit
noeme sememe episememe - meaning of unit
“John runs” = nominal + verbal + ordering
(tagmeme) (taxeme) (taxeme) (taxeme)
- critique of Bloomfield’s system
- Pike: no clear-cut distinction between taxemes and tagmemes
- Hockett: Bloomfield’s frame of reference did not make sence
- redundancy between lexical and grammatical divisions
- consider “horses” (plural morpheme) vs “men” (plural tagmeme)
- is “horses” plural because it contains a plural component [iz]?
- or is [iz] plural because it is part of a plural construction “horses”?
- Zellig Harris
- discovery procedures for phonemes & morphemes
- linguistics should primarily concern distribution, not meaning
- Charles Francis Hockett
- concepts of “morph” and “allomorph”
- design features of language
- Kenneth Lee Pike
- theory of tagmemics, hierarchical structure
- distinction between “emic” and “etic”
- Bloomfield’s works
- Tagalog texts with grammatical analysis (1917)
- Outline of Ilocano syntax (1942)
- Tagmemes in grammar
- A tagmemic grammar of Ivatan (Hidalgo & Hidalgo, 1971)
- A description of Hiligaynon syntax (Wolfenden, 1975)
- SIL research, PALI Language Texts
Primary references:
R. H. Robins (1997). A Short History of Linguistics. Essex: Addison Wesley Longman Limited.
P. H. Matthews (1993). Grammatical Theory in the United States from Bloomfield to Chomsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
G. Graffi (2015). History of Linguistics Handout 2 – Linguistics in the first half of the 20th century. Available:
http://www.dcuci.univr.it/documenti/OccorrenzaIns/matdid/matdid746212.pdf
L. A. Reid (1981). Philippine linguistics: The state of the art: 1970–1980. In Philippine studies: Political science, economics, and linguistics, ed. by Donn V. Hart,
212-273. Available: https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/33024/1/A22.1981.pdf
Additional references:
L. de Saussure (2006). Geneva School of Linguistics after Saussure. In Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics 2nd ed. 5:24-25. Oxford: Elsevier.
E. P. Hamp, P. Ivić, et al. (2020). Linguistics. In Encyclopædia Britannica. Available: https://www.britannica.com/science/linguistics/The-Prague-school
G. Guillaume (1984). Foundations for a Science of Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
L. Tesnière (1959). Éléments de syntaxe structurale. Paris: Klincksieck.
J. R. Firth (1957). A synopsis of linguistic theory 1930-1955. In Studies in Linguistic Analysis 1:1-32. Oxford: Blackwell.
L. Bloomfield (1926). A set of postulates for the science of language. In Language 2(3):153-164. Available: https://www.jstor.org/stable/408741
