Understanding the history of structural linguistics is therefore essential to understanding the origins of structuralism in anthropology. The history of structural linguistics is the coming together of two distinct traditions, one European and the other American.
The origin of the European tradition lies in the shift of direction which the Swiss linguist †Ferdinand de Saussure brought about as a result of his lectures (which were subsequently published by his students [Saussure 1960]). Saussure redirected linguistics away from studying the history of particular languages’ development (and demon-strating family links between them), and towards the study of the general principles according to which language in general worked. Saussure wanted to understand how the sounds produced by the human voice could convey the meaningful messages that were transmitted between individuals. In trying to account for this, he stressed how language worked by defining units which could be combined and recombined according to rules, such as those of syntax. His semantic theory, according to which the units were combinations of sounds (†signifier) and concepts (†signified), although naive, has often been solemnly discussed by many non-linguists including Lévi-Strauss himself. (See Sperber (1976 [1974]) for a discussion of its limitations, especially when applied to anthropology.) The significance of Saussure’s work for structuralism is, however, more general: it is that he saw the task of linguistics as the study of meaningful communication, and that he suggested that the answer to the problem of how this came about lay in understanding how units are placed in structures.
In fact it was not the most general Saussurian programme which was taken up by linguists immediately following him, but a more modest part of what is usually called †phoneme theory. Phonemes are the minimal sound units which every language distinguishes in order to make lexically significant combinations. Thus, to take a simple example, the English word ‘bat’ consists of three phonemes which are conveniently designated by three letters (it is not always the case that letters and phonemes correspond so neatly). However, not all languages have these same phonemes. Thus, although English distinguishes between the phonemes normally indicated by the letters p and b, a distinction which enables English-speakers to distinguish between the words ‘pat’ and ‘bat’, many languages make no such distinction. In other words native speakers, in order that they may use and understand their own language, have to be trained to pay special attention to certain sound contrasts and at the same time ignore others (which in another language might have been significant, but which in their own would just muddle them by introducing irrelevant and misleading information). Phonemes are thus arbitrarily defined nonmeaningful sound units which are combined and recombined in order that we can then construct higher level units (for example words) which themselves carry meaning.
The general universal aspects of phoneme theory (i.e. the definition of units by means of establishing conventional arbitrary contrasts in what would otherwise be a continuum of variation), and the fact that the units so defined have the potential to be combined according to rules in order that they may carry messages, became the basis of all forms of structuralism. Phoneme theory was originally developed by a group of Eastern European linguists to which Roman Jakobson belonged. When he moved to the USA with other colleagues, phoneme theory was extended both by linguists and by anthropologists such as Lévi-Strauss.
The linguists combined this theory with other American ones and in this way attempted to use the same model as had been used for phonemes for aspects of languages less concerned with sound and more with meaning. In this way they produced an all-embracing linguistic theory. What they retained from phoneme theory, however, was the idea that language works by: (1) defining units constructed through the emphasis of certain contrasts and the minimizing of others; and (2) combining and recombining these units according to rules of structure so that units plus structure produced the potential for meaningful communication. This general theory was ‘structural linguistics’. What became crucial for anthropology, above all, was the shift from understanding phonemes (or other elements of culture) as things in themselves, to understanding them as more or less arbitrary elements which only make sense in relationships with other elements.
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