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Structural Linguistics
[1400 words. For the Baker Encyclopedia of Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics]

Keith Allan
[Link]

Linguistics is the study of natural human language and languages; a linguist is someone who
studies and describes the structure and composition of language and/or languages in a
methodical and rigorous manner. Although ‘structural linguistics’ is a term primarily used to
characterise an approach to linguistics in the first half of the 20th century what came to be
called ‘structural linguistics’ has existed since antiquity (see Allan 2010) and is still practised
today.

Grammatical analysis developed among the Stoics (c.300BCE – 300CE) out of advances in
dialectic, which required knowledge of propositional types, propositional structure, the forms
of propositions, and valid inferences that may be drawn from propositions (Sextus Empiricus
1955, Diogenes Laertius 1925, Varro 1938). For the ancient Greeks, a proposition (the
content of a clause) was expressed as a declarative sentence – one with a potential truth value
and therefore also called an assertion, judgment, or statement. Consequently, the analysis of
the forms and structures of declarative propositions (single or combined) was concomitantly
an analysis of language forms and structures.

The Syntax of Apollonius Dyscolus (c.80–160CE) is a magnificent tour de force on Stoic

principles that argues for the semantic basis of grammar, while still paying close attention to
formal aspects of the language under investigation (Apollonius Dyscolus 1981). It is
principally an exposition of the language structures found in classical Greek literature and
first century Greek; Apollonius offered rational explanations for the regularities he perceived
in the morphosyntax of the language. Apollonius inspired Priscian (Priscianus Caesariensis,
c.490–560) whose Institutiones Grammaticae was the iconic grammar for Latin from the 6th
until the 20th century (Priscian 1961). Unfortunately, there is not much systematic analysis of
Latin sentence structures in Priscian, but there is guidance on relations between parts of
speech and sentence structure in so far as nouns and verbs are recognized as primary, and
other parts of speech as subordinate to them. The priority of the noun over other parts of
speech goes back to Apollonius; it was adopted by Priscian and taken up from him by the
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medieval grammarians (1100–1350). Supposedly, verbs always joined to a nominative;

therefore, the verb presupposes a subject (see Priscian 1961 XIII: 28; XIV: 15; XVII: 14) –
thus forming a proposition. Medieval grammarians focused on a theory of language structure
rather than language instruction (William of Conches 1965, Petrus Helias 1978, Thomas of
Erfurt 1972, Bursill-Hall 1971).

20th century European linguistics was greatly influenced by the work of Ferdinand de
Saussure (1857–1913). His Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues
Indo-européennes was on the vowel system of Proto-Indo-European (Saussure 1879); it was
the only book he ever published. Saussure studied among the neogrammarians in Leipzig, but
whereas the neogrammarians were rigidly inductive, the Mémoire is based on abstract
morphophonemic analysis in which the postulated abstract elements are defined on structural
function rather than phonetic shape. Emphasis on the function of an element within a
linguistic system remained characteristic of Saussure’s linguistics throughout his life.
Saussure never lost sight of the social and cognitive aspects of language as a system for
communication among people; but his emphasis on language as a structured system makes it
appropriate to label Saussure a ‘structuralist’, even though the term was not in use during his
lifetime.

Saussure’s analysis of language structure was disseminated by the posthumous Cours de

Linguistique Générale (CLG) assembled by his students (Saussure 1916). Linguistic structure
is identified in terms of the relationship of segments along the string (syntagmatic relations)
and the replacing of individual segments by other members of the same class of segment
(associative relations). The place of each constituent in the language system is determined by
comparison and contrast with other constituents. Saussure’s focus on the structural aspects of
language, which was part of a wider contemporary recognition of structures within human
behaviour, society, and cognition, gave credence and support to the growth of structuralist
linguistics in the 20th century. As Peter Matthews 2001: 142 says, ‘The structuralist bible is,
by long consent, Saussure’s Cours.’

In the lectures which gave rise to CLG Saussure brought together the various ideas of his
illustrious contemporaries and immediate predecessors, fashioning them into what was taken
to be a workable theory (Allan 2010; Seuren 2018). Saussure’s insistence that linguistics is an
independent science that should study language (langue) as a self-contained structured
system came to characterize 20th century linguistics. His discussion of syntagmatic and
associative relations was influential. His explications of the distinction between langue and
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parole as different manifestations of langage were better articulated that what we find in
Hermann Paul (Paul 1880). Today Saussure’s semiology is influential in fields outside of
linguistics; and his vision of language as a socially shared, psychologically real structured
system is shared by today’s functionalists.

Structuralist linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and postmodernist

theoreticians all genuflect to Saussure. Yet, if Saussure was a structuralist, then all the major
grammatical theories of the 20th century are structuralist because all of them focus on the
systematic structure of language, conceived as a hierarchically arranged whole (Trnka and
others 1964). This is applicable to virtually all theories of linguistics.

American structuralism based itself on the pioneering work of Franz Boas (1858–1942)
who wrote: ‘in an objective discussion of languages three points have to be considered: first
the constituent phonetic elements of the language; second, the groups of ideas expressed by
phonetic groups; third, the methods of combining and modifying the phonetic groups’ (Boas
1911: 35). Two generations of American linguists adopted this method of paying careful
attention to the phones uttered; reducing classes of phones to the set of phonemes for the
language; then recognizing recurrent sequences of phonemes as morphs, and so on; such that
the process of bottom-up segmentation and classification ultimately characterized sentences
in terms of their constituents (Blevins 2013). Another Boas legacy was that every language
must be analysed only in terms of its intrinsic categories, the linguist scrupulously resisting
any temptation to impose the grammatical categories and systems found in language X onto
another language, Y. Leonard Bloomfield (1887–1949) reprised this in Bloomfield 1933: 20
as ‘The only useful generalizations about language are inductive generalizations. Features
which we think ought to be universal may be absent from the very next language that
becomes accessible.’ Hence American structuralism (aka descriptivist, Bloomfieldian,
taxonomic linguistics) was rigidly inductivist.

Despite a favourable review of the second (1922) edition of CLG by Bloomfield 1924,
American linguistics barely noticed Saussure until Wells 1947. Bloomfield’s approach to
linguistics was mechanistic. He proclaims linguistics an empirical science, seeking to
establish that objectivity in examining linguistic data can be safeguarded by delimitation of
the aims of enquiry, a description of the procedures for analysis, followed by a statement of
the results, such that all statements about language should be open to verification or disproof
(Bloomfield 1926; 1933).
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Another Boas legacy is the importance of the sentence as a grammatical unit in 20th
century linguistics. ‘Since all speech is intended to serve for the communication of ideas, the
natural unit of expression is the sentence; that is to say a group of sounds which convey a
complete idea’ (Boas 1911: 27). Although Bloomfield was not unsympathetic to the cultural
context of language propagated by Boas, he came to exclude semantics from the
Bloomfieldian tradition, because semantics is not directly observable in the way that
phonemes, morphemes, and sentences are manifest in phones.

One of the main tenets of mechanistic linguistics was that utterances in a language were
examined for recurrent patterns, or ‘regularities’, as Zellig Harris (1909–1992) called them.

Descriptive linguistics […] deals not with the whole of speech activities, but with the
regularities in certain features of speech. These regularities are in the distributional relations
among the features of speech in question, i.e. the occurrence of these features relatively to each
other within utterances. (Harris 1960: 5)

Within American mechanistic linguistics, renamed ‘structural linguistics’ at the publication

of Harris’ Methods in Structural Linguistics (Harris 1951), meaning remained the
uninvestigated ghost in the machine. Harris took Bloomfieldian mechanism to its logical
conclusion by embracing the use of mathematical formulae and procedures in the statement
of linguistic units and relations, a practise adopted by his student Noam Chomsky (Chomsky
1957).

References
Allan, Keith. 2010. The Western Classical Tradition in Linguistics (Second expanded
edition). London: Equinox. [First edn 2007.].

Apollonius Dyscolus. 1981. The Syntax of Apollonius Dyscolus. Transl. by Fred W.

Householder. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Blevins, James P. 2013. American descriptivism ('structuralism'). In The Oxford Handbook of

the Hisotry of Linguistics, ed. by Keith Allan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. 419-
437.

Bloomfield, Leonard. 1924. Review of Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de Linguistique

Générale, 2nd edn, 1922. The Modern Language Journal 8: 317-19.

Bloomfield, Leonard. 1926. A set of postulates for the science of language. Language 2: 153–
64. Reprinted in Readings in Linguistics, ed. by Martin Joos. Washington D.C.: American
Council of Learned Societies. 1957: 26-31.
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Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Boas, Franz. 1911. Handbook of American Indian Languages. Volume 1. Washington D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution [The Introduction was published separately as Introduction to the
Handbook of American Indian Languages. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University
Press, 1963.]

Bursill-Hall, Geoffrey L. 1971. Speculative Grammars of the Middle Ages: The Doctrine of
the ‘partes orationis' of the Modistae. The Hague: Mouton.

Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.

Diogenes Laertius. 1925. Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Vol.2). Transl. by Robert D. Hicks.
Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann.

Harris, Zellig S. 1951. Methods in Structural Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

Harris, Zellig S. 1960. Structural Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. First
published 1951 as Methods in Structural Linguistics. .

Matthews, Peter H. 2001. A Short History of Structural Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Paul, Hermann. 1880. Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte. Halle: Max Niemeyer.

Petrus Helias. 1978. The Summa of Petrus Helias on Priscianus Minor. Ed. by James E.
Tolson. Introduction by Margaret Gibson. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen.

Priscian. 1961. Institutiones Grammaticae. In Grammatici Latini, ed. by Heinrich Keil. 8

vols. Hildesheim: Georg Olms. Pp. 2: 1-597 and 3: 1-377.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1879. Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues
Indo-européennes. Leipsick: Teubner.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916. Cours de Linguistique Générale. [Publié par Charles Bally et
Albert Sechehaye; avec la collaboration de Albert Riedlinger.]. Paris: Payot.

Seuren, Pieter A.M. 2018. Saussure and Sechehaye: Myth and Genius. A Study in the History
of Linguistics and the Foundations of Language. Leiden/Boston: Brill.

Sextus Empiricus. 1955. Sextus Empiricus. Transl. by Robert G. Bury. Loeb Classical
Library. 4 vols. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press & London: William
Heinemann.
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Thomas of Erfurt. 1972. Grammatica Speculativa. Transl. by Geoffrey L. Bursill-Hall.

London: Longman.

Trnka, Bohumil and others. 1964. Prague structural linguistics. In A Prague School Reader in
Linguistics, ed. by Josef Vachek. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pp. 468-80. First
published in Philologica Pragensia 1, 1958: 33-40.

Varro, Marcus T. 1938. De Lingua Latina. Transl. by Roland G. Kent. Loeb Classical
Library, Vols 333-4. London: Heinemann.

Wells, Roulon S. 1947. De Saussure's system of linguistics. Word 3: 1-31. Reprinted in

Readings in Linguistics, ed. by Martin Joos. Washington D.C.: American Council of
Learned Societies. 1957. Pp 1-18.

William of Conches. 1965. Glosae Super Platonem. Ed. by Édouard Jeauneau. Paris: J. Vrin.