新语言学流派

Chapter 12 Theories and Schools of Modern Linguistics

12.1 Saussure and Structuralism

12.1.1 Ferdinand de Saussure

12.1.2 Saussure’s Linguistic Concepts

12.1.3 Structuralism

12.2 The Prague School

12.2.1 Phonological Contribution

12.2.2 Syntactic Contribution —Functional Sentence Perspective

12.3 The London School

12.3.1 Firth

12.3.2 Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG)

12.4 American Structuralism

12.4.1 Bloomfield

12.4.2 Sapir

12.5 Transformational –Generative Grammar

12.5.1 Chomsky’s Syntactic Structure

12.5.2 Chomsky’s Innateness Hypothesis

12.5.3 Chomsky’s Competence vs. Performance

12.5.4 Structural Linguistics and T-G Grammar

12.1 Saussure and Structuralism

12.1.1 Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), a Swiss linguist and Sanskritist, excelled early in Indo-European philology. After his death, two of his students, C. Bally and A. Sechehaye, based on the students’ lecture notes and some of his own jottings, compiled A course in General Linguistics in 1916.

Saussure is widely considered to be the founder of modern linguistics in its attempts to describe the structure of language rather than the history of particular languages and language forms. He is also the linguist founder of structuralism. Saussure pointed out that language is not composed of individual units, each inherent with meaning, but a system of phonetic and semantic differences. For example, the word “bed” is what is not meant by the words “bad”, “bid”, “bud”, “fed”, etc..

12.1.2 Saussure’s Linguistic Concepts

1.Linguistic Sign —Signifier vs. Signified

Sign

Language is based on a NAMING process, by which things get associated with a word or name. Saussure says this is a pretty naïve or elementary view of language, because it gets across the idea that the basic linguistic unit has two parts. Saussure names those two parts the concept and the sound image. The linguistic sign is made of the union of a concept and a sound image. Saussure is very careful to emphasize that words do not refer to things in the real world but to ideas we include about the wor ld. For example, the word “tree” does not refer to the thing in the world but rather to a concept in our minds. One uses deictic markers like “this” or “that” to relate concepts to objects in the world.

According to Saussure, a linguistic sign is the combination of a signifier and a signified , the

sound image being the signifier

and the concept being the signified .

2. Langue VS Parole

Language

Saussure talks about the system of language as a whole as langue (from the French word for

language), and any individual unit within that system as a parole . Parole is an individual

realization of langue. Structural linguistics is more interested in the LANGUE than in any parole.

3. Synchronic VS Diachronic

Panchronic

A diachronic For example, we may examine the etymology of a word or the development of a genre. Diachronic

approaches give us a history and focus on how things change over time.

Saussure focuses on a s ynchronic analysis of language as a system or structure, that is, he

examines it only at one particular moment in time, without regard to what its past history is, or

what its future may be. For example, we might note how a word is distinguished from other words

at the moment. Synchronic approaches focus on how a given system is at a given moment and

how each part fits into the system.

4. Syntagmatic VS Associative

According to Saussure, meaning arises from the differences between signifiers; these

differences are of two kinds: syntagmatic and associative (now referred to as paradigmatic). These

two dimensions are often presented as “axes”, where the horizontal axis is the syntagmatic and the

vertical axis is the paradigmatic.