Required Reading

Saussure, General Principles (p 65-78, 88-91)

Emile Benveniste, Four: The Nature of the Linguistic Sign

RECOMMENDED:

Benveniste, Three: Saussure After Half a Century

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913 )

Swiss linguist, working on Indo-European philology came to reinvent the system, the way language is theorized.

Course in General Linguistics posthumously compiled from notes and lecture notes of his students.

Modern structuralism - rules of relations among elements

Semiology (semiotics)

What is the origin of Language?

Best guess seems that language developed in parallel with the species.

We don’t know and we can never know.

Bad question.

Origins don’t necessarily explain what’s going on

Two modes of analysis

Synchronic - description of the state of a language at a particular moment

Diachronic - change through time, comes from comparing sequences of synchronic analyses

Antecedents are not origins

Semiological point of view: system of signs

An open-ended, arbitrary symbol system-

A signal is transmitted from a sender to a receiver (or group of receivers) along a channel of communication. The signal will have a particular form and will convey a particular meaning (or message). The connection between form and meaning constitutes a code.

Study Language (langue) not speech (parole)

“The subject matter of linguistics comprises all manifestations of human speech, whether that of savages or civilized nations, or of archaic, classical or decadent periods.”

1) Describe all observable languages

2) Trace their histories (families), reconstruction

3) Determine permanent, universal forces, deduce general laws

4) Delimit and define the discipline

Saussurian Duality of Language

1) Oral - aural pairing

2) Union of sound-image and concept

3) individual and social

4) Synchronic and diachronic realitiesAn established system on the one hand

Always a product of the past

Langue is the true object of study

Parole (speech, speaking, articulation) is messy, hetereogeneous, variable, based in the individual

Langue (language, competence) “is both a social product of the faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty.”

Social crystalization of langue

“Among all the individuals that are linked together by speech, some sort of average will be set up: all will reproduce—not exactly of course, but approximately—the same signs united with the same concepts.”

The social, the essential

Not the individual, accidental, accessory

langue is no less concrete than parole

“Whereas speech is heterogeneous, language, as defined is homogeneous. It is a system of signs in which the only essential thing is the union of meanings and sound-images, and in which both parts of th sign are psychological.

linguistic signs are not abstractions

•science that studies the life of signs wthin society

•shows what consititute signs, what laws govern them

• language is the prototypical semiological system

Science of signs - semiology

Linguistics as a model for general semiology

“Language is comparable to a symphony in that what the symphony actually is stands completely apart from how it is performed; the mistakes that musicians make in playing the symphony do not compromise this fact.”

Emile Benviniste’s explanation of Structuralism

Saussure never uses the word ‘structure’:

“Language is a system that has its own arrangement.”

The system is an interdependent whole.

If one part is modified, the whole system is affected because it remains coherent.

Saussurian principles

Language is form, not substance

Units of language can only be defined by their relationships

Structuralism first enunciated by Prague School of Linguists following these principles

(Roman Jakobson, Nikolay Trubetzkoy)

Structuralism

Trubetskoy: “One cannot determine the place of a word in a lexical system until one has studied the structure of the said system.”

A science of the whole - system of relations•system is formed of units that mutually affect one another

• distinguished from other systems by the internal arrangements of these units

• arrangement is structure

French structuralism

Benveniste:

“The structuralist doctrine teaches the predomincance 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.”

Arbitrariness

Benveniste, ‘Nature of the Linguistic Sign’: • Arbitrariness of the sign is when analyzed across

systems• The linguistic sign is non-arbitrary (necessary)

within the system.• Can’t say just anything and be speaking English.• Natural logic of the system (Whorf)

Metaphor of the chess game

c

Diachronic view: previous state

More chess

Change in time

This is

Structures of the system

c

Changes in the structure

This is

Structuralism

Claude Levi-Strauss

Edmund Leach

Rodney Needham

Dual oppositions

Structures need not be pairs. Can be triads (Turner) or encompassing hierarchies (Dumont)

Speech and communication

Speech is one-dimensional, sequence of signs

Communication includes gestures and other signals

Operates in parallel to speech

Reinforcing ideas

Contradicting (mixed signals)