EIGHT

"Structure" in Linguistics

IN THE COURSE OF THE last twenty years, the term "structure" has undergone considerable extension after acquiring a doctrinal and somewhat programmatic value. "Moreover, it is not structure that seems to be the essential term now so much as the adjective structural, used to qualify a kind of linguistics. Structural rapidly led to structuraHsm and structuralist. Thus an ensemble of designations 1 was created which other disciplines have now borrowed from linguistics in order to adapt them to their own values. 2 Today one cannot glance over the table of contents of a linguistics journal without meeting one of these terms, often in the title of the work. We will readily admit that a concern for being "modern" is not foreign to this widespread use and that certain "structuralist" pronouncements cover works whose novelty or interest is debatable. The object of the present note is not to denounce the abuse but to explain the use. The question is not to assign its field and limits to "structural" linguistics but to clarify what is involved in the concern with structure and what meaning this term had for those linguists who first gave it a precise meaning. 3 The principle of "structure" as a topic for study was asserted a little before 1930 by a small group of linguists who proposed to react thus against the exclusively historical concept of language, against a linguistics that broke language down into isolated elements and was engaged in following the changes that took place in them. It is agreed that this movement had its origin in the teachings of Ferdinand de Saussure at Geneva, as they were put into writing by his students and published under the title Cours de linguistique generale. 4 Saussure is rightly called the precursor of modern structuralism. s He certainly was, except for the term. It is important to note, for exactitude in describing this movement of ideas which must not be simplified, that Saussure never used the word "structure" in any sense whatever. In his eyes, the essential notion was system. In that was the novelty of his doctrine, in the idea -so full of implications that it took a long time to perceive and develop-that language forms a system. That is the way the Cours presented it, in statements

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that should be recalled: "Language is a system that has its own arrangement" (p. 43 [po 22]); " ... language is a system of arbitrary signs" (p. 106 [po 73]); "Language is a system whose parts can and must all be considered in their synchronic solidc.rity" (p. 124 [po 87]). And above everything else, Saussure stated the primacy of the system over the clements which composed it: " ... to consider a term as simply the union of a certain sound with a certain concept is grossly misleading. To define it in this way would isolate the term from its system; it would mean assuming that one can start from the terms and construct the system by adding them together when, on the contrary, it is from the interdependent whole that one must start and through analysis obtain its elements" (p. 157 [po 113]). This last sentence contains the germ of all that is essential in the "structural" concept. But it was always to the system that Saussure referred. This notion was familiar to Saussure's students in Paris.6 'VeIl before it was worked out in the Cours de linguistique generale, Meillet had stated it several times, without failing to ascribe it to the teaching of his master, of whom he said, "throughout his whole life what he was trying to determine was the system of the languages he was studying."7 When Meillet said that "each language is a rigorously organized system in which everything holds together,"8 it was to give Saussure the credit for having shown this in the system of Indo-EuropeaIl vowels. He came back to this several times: "It is never legitimate to explain a detail except in the context of the general system of the language in which it appears";9 "A language constitutes a complex system of means of expression, a system in which everything holds together .... "10 In the same way, Grammont praised Saussure for having shown "that each language forms a system in which everything holds together, in which the facts and phenomena control one another and can be neither isolated nor contradictory."ll In discussing "phonetic laws" he stated, "There are no isolated phonetic changes .... The whole set of articulations in a language in effect constitutes a system in which everything holds together, in which everything depends strictly on everything else. As a result, if a modification is produced in one part of the system, there is a good chance that the whole system will be affected, for it is necessary that the system remain coherent."12 Thus the notion of language as system was accepted long ago by those who were taught by Saussure, first in comparative grammar and then in general linguistics. 13 If one adds to this two other principles which are equally Saussurian: that language is form, not substance, and that the units of language can only be defined by their relationships, one will have indicated the fundamentals of the doctrine which some years later was to show the structure of linguistic systems. This doctrine was first expressed in the proposals for studying phonemic

" Structure" in Linguistics

81

systems,14 drawn up in French by three Russian linguists, R. Jakobson, S. Karcevski, and N. Trubetskoy, and addressed to the First International Congress of Linguists at The Hague in 1928. These innovators were themselves to name those whom they considered their predecessors, Saussure on the one hand, and Baudouin de Courtenay on the other. But even then their ideas had taken an autonomous form, and as early as 1929 they formulated them in the theses published in French at Prague for the First Congress of Slavic Philologists. 15 These anonymous theses, which constituted a veritable manifesto, inaugurated the activity of the Linguistic Circle of Prague. It was in them that the term structure appeared, with the value which several examples will illustrate. The title speaks of "problems of methodology stemming from the conception of language as a system," and the subtitle, " ... structural comparison and genetic comparison." They advocated "a method suitable for permitting the discovery of the laws of structure of linguistic systems and their evolution."16 The notion of "structure" was closely linked with that of "relationship" within the system: "The sensory content of phonological elements is less essential than their reciprocal relationships within the system (structural principle of the phonological system)."17 Hence this rule of method: "The phonological system must be characterized ... by an obligatory specification of the relationships existing among the said phonemes; that is, by tracing the structural scheme of the language being considered."18 These principles are applicable to all parts of the language, even to "categories of words, a system whose extent, precision, and internal structure (reciprocal relationships of its elements) must be studied for each language in particular."19 "One cannot determine the place of a word in a lexical system until one has studied the structure of the said system."20 In the collection containing these theses, several other articles by Czech linguists (Mathesius, Havranek), also written in French, contain the word "structure."21 It will be noted in the most explicit of these quotations that "structure" is complemented by the phrase "of a system." Such indeed is the sense of the term when Trubetskoy used it again a little later in an article in French on phonology:22 "To define a phoneme is to indicate its place in the phonological system, which is impossible unless one takes into account the structure of the system .... Phonology, which is universalist in nature, starts with the system as with an organic whole whose structure it studies."23 It follows that several systems can and should be confronted: "In applying the principles of phonology to several completely different languages in order to show their phonological systems, and in studying the structure of these systems, one soon perceives that certain combinations of correlations recur in the most diverse languages, while others do not exist anywhere at all. These are laws of structure of phonological systems."24 "A phonological system is not the mechanical

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sum of isolated phonemes but an organized whole of which the phonemes are the members and whose structure is subject to laws."25 According to this, the development of phonology is in accord with that of the natural sciences: "Present-day phonology is characterized above all by its structuralism and by its systematic universalism .... The age in which we live is characterized by the tendency in all the scientific disciplines to replace atomism by structuralism and individualism by universalism (in the philosophical sense of these terms, of course). This tendency can be observed in physics, in chemistry, in biology, in psychology, in economics, etc. Present-day phonology is thus not isolated. It has a place in a broader scientific movement."26 Granting that language is system, it is then a matter of analyzing its structure. Each system, being formed of units that mutually affect one another, is distinguished froIll other systems by the internal arrangements of these units, an arrangement which constitutes its structure. 27 Certain combinations are frequent, others fairly rare, and still others, while theoretically possible, are never realized. To envisage a language (or each part of a language, such as its phonetics, morphology, etc.) as a system organized by a structure to be revealed and described is to adopt the "structuralist" point of view. 28 The views of these first phonologists, based on precise descriptions of various phonological systems, gained many adherents within a few years, even outside the Linguistic Circle of Prague, so that it became possible in 1939 to found a journal in Copenhagen, Acta Linguistica, which is entitled Revue internationale de linguistique structurale. In the preliminary announcement, written in French, the Danish linguist Viggo Br0ndal justified the orientation of the journal by the importance "structure" had acquired in linguistics. In this connection he referred to the definition of the word "structure" by Lalande: "To designate, in opposition to a simple combination of elements, a whole formed of mutually dependent elements, such that each depends on the others and can only be what it is by its relationship with them."29 He also stressed the parallelism between structural linguistics and "Gestalt" psychology, by invoking the definition of the "Gestalttheorie" given by Claparede :30 "It conceives of phenomena not as a sum of elements which it is of special concern to isolate, analyze, and dissect, but as ensembles (Zusammenhange) consisting of autonomous units, manifesting an internal cohesiveness, and having their own laws. Hence the mode of being of each element depends on the structure of the ensemble and the laws which govern it."31 When Louis Hjelmslev took up the editorship of Acta Linguistica in 1944, after the death of V. Br0ndal, he defined again the domain of structural linguistics: "By structural linguistics is understood an ensemble of investigations resting on a hypothesis according to which it is scientifically legitimate to describe language as being essentially an autonomous entity of internal de-

"Structure" in Linguistics pel1dences, or, in a \vord, a structure. The analysis of this entity always allows for the disengagement of parts which affect one another reciprocally and \vhich each depends on certain others and would be neither conceivable nor definable without those other parts. This analysis sees its subject matter as a network of dependences, considering linguistic phenomena as related to one another."32 Such were the origins of "structure" and "structural" as technical terms. Today the very development of linguistic studies 33 tends to split "structuralism" into such diverse interpretations that one of those who claim allegiance to this doctrine does not hesitate to write that "under the common and misleading label of 'structuralism' are to be found schools of extremely divergent inspiration and tendencies .... The quite general use of terms like 'phoneme' and even 'structure' often serves to camouflage profound differenccs."34 One of these differences, undoubtedly the most notable, is the one which may be observed between the American use of the term "structure" and the definitions given above. 35 To limit ourselves to the use generally made of the word "structure" in European linguistics in works written in French, we shall stress some features which are capable of constituting a minimal definition of it. The fundamental principle is that a language constitutes a system whose parts are all united in a relationship of solidarity and dependence. This system organizes units, which are the articulated signs, mutually differentiating and delimiting themselves. The structuralist doctrine teaches the predominance of the system over the elements, and aims to define the structure of the system through the relationships among the elements, in the spoken chain as well as in formal paradigms, and shows the organic character of the changes to which language is subject.

From Sens et usages du terme "structure" dans les sciences humaines et sociales, ed. R. Bastide (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1962), pp. 31-39