Structuralism

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. It posits that elements of human culture
must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure.
Structuralism was both an intellectual movement with wide ramifications in the twentieth
century and an attempt to provide scientific status to the knowledge of language, culture, and
society.

Structuralism originated in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), a Swiss linguist

whose lectures, when published by his students in 1916, launched the new school of thought.
These two students, Charles Bally and Albert Sechaye who became well known linguistic
researchers in their own right, put together course notes from their and other students’ notebooks
to produce the “Cours de Linguistique Generale” based on several of Saussure’s courses of
lectures at Geneva, using the notebooks of various students attending. This composite work,
shaped and interpreted by Bally and Sechaye, was prepared in the years immediately following
Saussure’s death as a tribute and as a way making his brilliant ideas accessible beyond Geneva
and for posterity.

Initially, the influence of Saussure's ideas was limited to linguistics and to the linguistics-based
study of literature that the Russian formalists carried out in the early decades of the twentieth
century. When one of the leaders of the formalist movement, Roman Jakobson, immigrated to
the United States during World War II, he met the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss
and introduced him to Saussure's work. When Lévi-Strauss returned to France after the war, he
launched structural anthropology and initiated French structuralism. His work in the late 1940s
and 1950s inspired congruent and related work in psychoanalysis, sociology, history, and literary
and cultural studies that culminated in the mid-1960s in the writings of literary scholars Roland
Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, and Julia Kristeva, historian Michel Foucault, and psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan.

Saussure examines the relationship between speech and the evolution of language, and
investigates language as a structured system of signs. He defines linguistics as the study of
language, and as the study of the manifestations of human speech. He says that linguistics is also
concerned with the history of languages, and with the social or cultural influences that shape the
development of language.

Sign, Signifier and Signified

The sign is, for Saussure, the basic element of language. Meaning has always been explained in
terms of the relationship between signs and their referents. Saussure defined a sign as being
composed of a ‘signifier’ (signifiant) and a ‘signified’ (signifié). Contemporary commentators
tend to describe the signifier as the form that the sign takes and the signified as the concept to
which it refers. So Saussure divides the sign into its two aspects: signifier and signified. First
there’s the bit that you can see or hear. Actually you can imagine signs that are accessible to each
of the senses. If you can see, hear, touch, taste or smell it you can probably interpret it and it is
likely to have some meaning for you. Audible and visible signs have priority for Saussure
because they are the types of sign that make up most of our known languages. Such signs are
called "verbal" signs (from the Latin verba meaning "word"). The sensible part of a verbal sign
(the part accessible to the senses) is the part you see or hear. This is its signifier. The signified is
what these visible/audible aspects mean to us.

Saussure makes the distinction in these terms:

A linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept [signified] and
a sound pattern [signifier]. The sound pattern is not actually a sound; for a sound is something
physical. A sound pattern is the hearer’s psychological impression of a sound, as given to him by
the evidence of his senses. This sound pattern may be called a ‘material’ element only in that it is
the representation of our sensory impressions. The sound pattern may thus be distinguished from
the other element associated with it in a linguistic sign. This other element is generally of a more
abstract kind: the concept.

For Saussure, both the signifier (the ‘sound pattern’) and the signified (the concept) were purely
‘psychological’. Both were non-material form rather than substance. Nowadays, while the basic
‘Saussurean’ model is commonly adopted, it tends to be a more materialistic model than that of
Saussure himself. The signifier is now commonly interpreted as the material (or physical) form
of the sign – it is something which can be seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted.
Within the Saussurean model, the sign is the whole that results from the association of the
signifier with the signified. The relationship between the signifier and the signified is referred to
as ‘signification’, and this is represented in the Saussurean diagram by the arrows. The horizontal
broken line marking the two elements of the sign is referred to as ‘the bar’. If we take a linguistic
example, the word ‘open’ (when it is invested with meaning by someone who encounters it on a
shop doorway) is a sign consisting of:

• a signifier: the word ‘open’;

• a signified concept: that the shop is open for business.

A sign must have both a signifier and a signified. You cannot have a totally meaningless signifier
or a completely formless signified. A sign is a recognizable combination of a signifier with a
particular signified. The same signifier (the word ‘open’) could stand for a different signified
(and thus be a different sign) if it were on a push-button inside a lift (‘push to open door’).
Similarly, many signifiers could stand for the concept ‘open’ (for instance, on top of
a packing carton, a small outline of a box with an open flap for ‘open this end’) – again, with
each unique pairing constituting a different sign.

e.g: Joyce’s rose may stand for Ireland.

Saussure focused on the linguistic sign and he ‘phonocentrically’ privileged the spoken word. As
we have noted, he referred specifically to the signifier as a ‘sound pattern’ (image acoustiqu). He
saw writing as a separate, secondary, dependent but comparable sign-system.

Within the (‘separate’) system of written signs, a signifier such as the written letter ‘t’ signified a
sound in the primary sign-system of language (and thus a written word would also signify a
sound rather than a concept).

Thus for Saussure, writing relates to speech as signifier to signified or, as Derrida puts it, for
Saussure writing is ‘a sign of a sign’. Most subsequent theorists who have adopted Saussure’s
model tend to refer to the form of linguistic signs as either spoken or written.

Saussure’s theory has been criticised, for instance for confusing words as sound-patterns with
words as signs. As Marya Mazor states, “It does not make sense to say that a word can be
exchanged with an idea if, as a sign, such an idea is part of its makeup.” She goes on to point out
that in the exchange of words, Saussure views words as signs, as Mazor calls it, “meaning-and-
form combinations,” leading to a rejection of real-world context. In viewing words as the “coins”
of the language, Saussure sees them as interchangeable with other words or ideas-a viewing of
words as sound-patterns. However, in word exchange, the word is contextually defined, and the
exchange of another word “coin” in its place will never be precise; in short, it is an inexact trade
Langue and Parole

Ferdinand de Saussure made a sharp distinction between three main terms- le langage, la langue
and la parole, and the concentrated on two of them. He envisaged le langage (human speech a
whole) to be composed of two aspects, which he called langue (the language system) and parole
(the act of speaking).

Le Langage

Le langage has no exact equivalent in English, it embraces the faculty of language in all its
various forms and manifestations. Le langage is the faculty of human speech present in all
normal human beings due to heredity, but which requires the correct environmental stimuli for
proper development. It is our faculty to talk to each other. Taken as a whole it is many-sided
heterogeneous; straddling several areas simultaneously- physical, physiological and
psychological- It belongs to the individual and to society; we cannot put it into any category of
human facts for we cannot discover its unity. Langage, thus is a universal behaviour trait- more
of interest to the anthropologist or biologist than a linguist, who commences his study with
langues and paroles.

La langue

Langue, according to Saussure, is the totality (the collective fact) of a language, deductible from
an examination of the memories of all the language users. It is a storehouse, ‘the sum of word-
images in the minds of individuals’. It is not to be confused with human speech (language) of
which it is only a definite part, though certainly an essential one. It is both a social product of the
faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social
body permit individuals to exercise that faculty. Langue, therefore, is a corporate, social
phenomenon. It is homogenous whereas langage is heterogeneous. It is concrete and we can
study it. It is a system of linguistic sign which are not abstract but real entities, tangible to be
reduced to conventional written symbols. Putting it loosely langue is grammar + vocabulary +
pronunciation, system of a community.

La Parole

Parole is the only object available for direct observation to the linguist. Utterances are instances
of parole. The underlying structure in terms of which we produce them as speakers and
understand them as hearers, in the langue in question (Hindi, Persian, Sanskrit, Chinese etc.) and
is independent of the physical medium (or substance) in which it is realized. A langue, on the
other hand, is not spoken by anybody, but is a composite body of linguistic phenomena derived
as it were from the personal dialects (paroles) of all native speakers. The langue is in essence a
social phenomenon, having reality only as a social institution, it is, therefore, constant, supra-
individualistic, and generalized; the individual speaker can neither create it nor modify it easily
and ordinarily.

We can think in terms of game of chess. Each game has so many pieces. But one can not use all
the pieces simultaneously. We use what is required.

Langue Parole

Code Encoding

Potential Actualized

Social Individual

Fixed Free

Slow-moving Ephemeral

Psychological Psycho-physical

Competence and Performance

Naom Chomsky’s concept of competence and performance is somewhat similar to Saussure’s

concept of langue and parole. Competence, according to Chomsky, is the native speaker’s
knowledge of his language, the system of rules he has mastered, his ability to produce and
understand a vast number of new sentences themselves, of the actual use of the language in real-
life situation. So the speaker’s knowledge of the structure of a language is his linguistic
competence and the way in which he uses it, is his linguistic performance.

Competence is, then, an underlying mental system, it underlies actual behaviour, linguistics
ability to analyze language, detecting ambiguities, ignoring mistakes, understanding new
sentences, producing entirely new sentences. Whereas competence is a set of principles which a
speaker masters, performance is what a speaker does. The former is a kind of code, the latter is
an act of encoding or decoding. Competence concerns the kind of structures the person has
succeeded in mastering and internalizing, whether or not he utilizes them, in practice, without
interference from many of the factors that play a role in actual behaviour.

“For any one concerned with intellectual processes, or with any question that goes
beyond mere date arranging, it is the question of competence that is fundamental. Obviously one
can find out about competence only by studying performance; but this study must be carried out
in devious and clever ways, if any serious is to be obtained.”
In this way, the abstract, internal grammar which enables a speaker to utter and understand an
infinite number of potential utterances is a speaker’s competence. This competence is free from
the interference of memory span, characteristics errors, lapses of attention, etc.

“The speaker has represented in his brain a grammar that gives an ideal account of the
structure of the sentences of his language, but, when actually faced with the task of speaking or
understanding many other factors, acts upon his underlying linguistic competence to produce
actual performance. He may be confused or have several things in mind, change his plans in
midstream, etc. Since this is obviously the condition of most actual linguistic performance, a
direct record- an actual corpus- is almost useless as it stands, for linguistic analysis of any but the
most superficial kind.”

Competence in any sphere can be identified with capacity or ability, as opposed to actual
performance. Competence in linguistics is the ‘linguistic ability- the ability to produce and
understand indefinitely many novel sentences; it refers to the native speaker’s innate creativity
and productivity implicit in the normal use of language.

This distinction has cause a lot of argument in current-day linguistics. Some socio-linguistics
regard it as an unreal distinction which ignores the importance of studying language in its social
setting. They say that many of today’s grammars are based on unjustified assumptions
concerning a speaker’s competence rather on his performance. But the division is a useful one, if
not carried to extremes. In an ideal situation, the two approaches should complement each other.
Any statement concerning a speaker’s competence must ultimately be based on data collected
while studying his performance.

Although Chomsky’s competence/performance dichotomy closely resembles Saussure’s

langue/parole, yet main difference is that Suassure stresses the psychological implications of
competence. These distinctions are also parallel to a distinctions made between code and
message in communication engineering. A code is the pre-arranged signaling system. A message
is an actual message sent through that system.