Page 346 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes linguistic features (gestures, etc.) are missing in writing besides total values, contrastive stresses,
etc. Dependence on written language tended to promote prescriptivism and language teaching
divorced from actual speech habits of the day. The structuralists attempted to change this
emphasis with great success.
2. Objective treatment of all languages: All languages are structurally complex and completely
adequate to the needs of their speech community. It was a common belief of the descriptive
linguist, who studies languages for a better understanding of human languages as such, he
took every language as an equal manifestation of the structure of human languages. At v same
time, he studied each language separately not assuming that languages had common universal
properties.
3. Importance of synchronic description: Whereas the traditional and the historical grammarians
were interested on the diachronic (through time) studies of language, the structuralists found it
important to describe the language of the day as it is available for study and description.
Synchronic description implies a study of usage of the day and of such varieties as exist in the
language at the time of study.
4. Linguistics is a descriptive, not a prescriptive science: The traditional grammarian tended to
assume, not only that the written language was more fundamental than the spoken, but also
that a particular form of the written language, namely the literary language, was inherently
‘purer’ and more ‘correct’ than all other forms of the language, written and spoken; and that it
was his duty, as a grammarian, to ‘preserve’ that form of the language from ‘corruption’. The
traditional grammarian treated grammar as a set of normative, prescriptive rules. But the
structuralists gave up such notions and treated linguistics as a descriptive science.
5. System Structure: The structural linguist was concerned with describing the organization or
the pattern, or the system or the structure of the language under scrutiny. According to the
structuralists, the most striking feature of human languages is the complexity of their structure.
Their study of language was based on empirical evidence.
6. Language and Utterance: The structuralists maintained a clear distinction between language
and utterance, between langue and parole. Language is an abstraction of a system at work; the
parole is an instance, manifestation, in context demonstration of the principles at work. It was
Saussure who indicated this difference between the two. He proposed that the task of the
descriptive linguist was to state the relationship between actual speech acts and their recurring
patterns. So to a structuralist a language is not the same thing as an utternace: it is abstraction of
a system at work, the other is an instance, manifestation of the principles at work.
Strengths of Structural Linguists

‘The major contributions of structural linguistics’, according to Chomsky, ‘are methodological rather
than substantive.’ It made the study of language scientific, precise, verifiable and objective. It took a
living dialect for the study and analysed its features. The aim was to begin with the raw data and
arrive at a grammatical description of the corpus (and therefore of the language). First the element
(phonetic, morphemic or syntactic) are set, and then are stated their distribution. And lastly, the
syntax is analysed into constituents, and their relationship stated in terms of structures, but it is not
always necessary to maintain this particular order. In brief, ‘the structural linguist is committed to
the objective study of a language in his own terms in order to arrive at an abstract, synchronic
description of the organization of the language analysed’.
Structural linguistics is empirical, makes exactness a methodological requirement, and insists that all
definitions be publicly verifiable or reliable. It examines all languages in terms of their phonological
and grammatical systems. Because its description is structural, the uniqueness of each language is
recognized; it also facilitates comparison. It described the minimum required contrasts that underline
any construction or conceivable use of a language and not just those discoverable in some particular
use.

340 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY