Page 345 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Unit 27: Grammar: Traditional to Transformational

Structural Grammar Notes
The beginning of the twentieth century was marked by the new approaches suggested by Ferdinand
de Saussure and the Prague School Linguists in Europe, the anthropological linguists in America,
and the advances then being made in behavioural psychology and natural sciences. Consequently
scientists began to study language in terms of observable and verifiable data obtained from the
behaviour of the users of language. This new movement, which was a reaction against the ‘traditional’
or ‘universal’ grammars and an improvement upon the historical and comparative studies of languages
in the nineteenth century, is known as structural linguistics as it attempts to describe a language as it
is used in terms of recurrent element and recurrent regularities (structure). It has been called
“mechanical” because its procedure is mechanical. It studies a language employing certain procedures
which linguists have formulated, tested and improved. Furthermore, it eschews the mentalistic
approach which is based on intuitive analysis of data, and insists on purely objective analysis.
In the words of John Lyons, the term structuralism ‘means that each language is regarded as a system
of relations (more precisely, a set of interrelated system), the elements of which—sound, words,
etc.—have no validity independently of the relations of equivalence and contrast which hold between
them.’ (Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics).
The structuralists proved themselves to be iconoclasts. They used ‘structure’ somewhat as a slogan,
and ignored meaning. They emphasized that the language should be studied in a mechanical way,
and a linguist should therefore discover the various constituents of a language as a botanist discovers
the petals of a flower. By structure the followers of Bloomfield meant ‘regularities’, ‘patterns’ or
‘rules’ of language. In fact, they envisaged language structure in a very precise and limited manner.
In particular it was ‘associated’ with the ‘phoneme’ as the unit of phonology and the ‘morpheme’ as
the unit of grammar. The structuralist’s method implies that first we must find the phonemes, and
then the morphemes, each without any reference to anything that has not already been empirically
established. When the morphological elements have been set up, followed by a statement of their
distribution, the structuralist can proceed on to analyse syntax into constituents, and state their
relationship in terms of structure. Thus he has to establish phonemes without reference to morphemes
(grammar) and both phonemes and morphemes without reference to semantics (meaning). So he is
committed to the objective study of a language in its own terms in order to arrive at an abstract,
synchronic description of the organization of the language analysed.
According to structuralism, any sentence of a language may be represented as a particular arrangement
of the ultimate constituents, the minimal grammatical elements, of which it is composed. Every sentence
has therefore what is known as linear surface. The structuralist developed the system of immediate
constituents, or IC, Analysis.
Attention to structure, study of the spoken language, use of the inductive method of scientific analysis,
and working from form to meaning characterize the work of the structural grammarian. He treats
grammar as a device by which words are combined into larger units of discourse. He analyses the
data, a given corpus, by means of inductive methods, and formulates a grammar based on discovery
procedures of the data. To him grammar would mean a catalogue of elements classified with
restrictions enumerated and relations made physically manifest. Restrictions were based on notions
of distribution. It is a discovery of the organization of a sentence into its immediate and ultimate
constituents.
Basic Assumptions of Structural Linguistics
1. Priority of the spoken languages: While almost all traditional grammarians till the beginning
of our own century assumed the ‘superiority’ of the written form to the spoken form of language,
the structural linguists maintained that spoken form is prior to the written form, and must form
the main field of linguistic study. They maintain that the spoken language is primary and that
writing is essentially a means of representing speech in another medium. The principle of priority
of the spoken language over the written implies, first of all, that speech is older and more wide-
spread than writing; that all systems of writing (except perhaps Chinese) are demonstrably
based upon units of spoken language; that speech is acquired first and writing afterwards; and
that no writing system in use can convey or represent all the features of speech. The extra-

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