Transcription
This is a short introduction to Cur structural Linguistics and its Central Concepts. Ferdinand Desu was a Swiss linguist credited with founding the field of structural Linguistics, a radical new theory of language as a structured system. He is often referred to as the father of modern Linguistics, an honor divided between him and non Chomsky, depending on who you ask. His most influential work, Course in General Linguistics, was published postly in 1916.
But what is structural Linguistics? It's the idea that language is a system of contrast and equivalence. In structural Linguistics, language consists of strings of linguistic objects, be they words, phones, or morphes. And these objects are defined only through the fact that they contrast with other objects in the language system. This was an entirely new way of thinking about languages and presented a radical change from previous approaches.
In order to begin to understand structural Linguistics, we first need to understand the key ideas. First, there's the sign. So Su sign consists of the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the sounds or the letters used to denote what we're talking about. Signified is the actual concept of the thing, that is the idea in Our Minds when we hear or read the signifier. The actual real thing in the world is called the referent. Note the difference between the thought of a cat and an actual real cat. The sign is a two-sided psychological entity, as one can't exist without the other. It just couldn't be a sign. Imagine a coin of just one side, you can't right.
Secondly, Suu highlights that there is an arbitrary and conventional relationship between a signifier and its signified. Arbitrary because there's no natural reason why we call a cat a cat, and that's why different languages have different words for the same thing. The convention of language refers to the idea that a speech Community needs to adhere to the same connections between a signify and it signified. For example, English speakers all share a very similar concept of Cat when they hear that word. I can't just start calling a cat a dog and expect anyone to know what I'm talking about.
Thirdly, Suu distinguishes between the use of language, par, and the system of language, long. Long being the system of language, such as syntax or phology, is an abstract system. On the other hand, is the use of that language, and this is an individual matter. Have you noticed that people have their own language quirks? Well, this is the individual side, the actual youth of language.
Fourthly, Suu distinguishes between synchrony and diony. Synchrony refers to a complete language system at just one point in time. Think of it as a snapshot of language. Diacon, on the other hand, is how that language develops over time. This is also known as historical Linguistics. You may have noticed changes in language over your lifetime, with different words appearing or disappearing, or slight pronunciation changes. That's diacon.
The fifth and final thing thing we'll go over is the Paradigm and the synag. They represent two axes used to describe languages. The synag is the linear pattern or sequence of linguistic objects. For example, the words in a sentence: the cat sat on the mat. It can also be the Sounds in a word, for example, clay. This axis is essentially one of contrast. You can't swap words around in the sentence without scrambling the meaning, and likewise, you can't swap the letters in clay around without destroying the arbitrary connection between the signifier and the signified.
The Paradigm refers to a group of linguistic objects which have similarities and that can replace one another in the synag. Take the earlier synag: the cat sat on the mat. You can replace cat with dog or baby. But in this particular synag, you can't use a word like fish. Fish just can't sit. But in a different synag, they could be used to replace cat. For example, in the synag, I like all animals, especially fish. So just because some objects have a paradigmatic relationship in one specific syum doesn't mean that it holds in all contexts.
Let's look at another example using sounds in the word clay. In this synag, the C can be replaced by P to produce play. But we can't replace the C with a T. English doesn't allow the TL sequence. Another syum still, here we can replace the T with a P to produce The synag Spill. The T and the P belong to the same Paradigm in this example. The a of the syag and the Paradigm are key to understanding what Su means when he talks about meaning, depending on the systems of a language.
So why is any of this interesting? Well, until Suu started forming his ideas about language, the study of language is Laden with belief. Su stressed that language was structural, thereby freeing it from associations, be they social, cultural, political, historical, practically. This approach to language means that it is studied based on structural relations alone. A linguistic object's meaning is understood through its contrast with other linguistic objects in the system. Language is therefore a static system of these interconnected linguistic objects.