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Lingg 206: Grammatical Analysis I Angelina A. Aquino

This document provides an overview of structural linguistics, covering key figures and concepts from the European and American traditions. It discusses Saussure's foundational work establishing structuralism and the sign. Subsequent European schools that developed include the Geneva, Prague, and Copenhagen schools. The American tradition began with anthropological research by Boas and Sapir and was advanced by Bloomfieldian structural linguistics. Post-Bloomfieldian linguists like Harris, Hockett, and Pike further developed the field. Structuralist frameworks were also applied to the analysis of Philippine languages.

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177 views

Lingg 206: Grammatical Analysis I Angelina A. Aquino

This document provides an overview of structural linguistics, covering key figures and concepts from the European and American traditions. It discusses Saussure's foundational work establishing structuralism and the sign. Subsequent European schools that developed include the Geneva, Prague, and Copenhagen schools. The American tradition began with anthropological research by Boas and Sapir and was advanced by Bloomfieldian structural linguistics. Post-Bloomfieldian linguists like Harris, Hockett, and Pike further developed the field. Structuralist frameworks were also applied to the analysis of Philippine languages.

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AkinoTenshi
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Lingg 206: Grammatical Analysis I

Angelina A. Aquino
I. What is structuralism?
- Saussure: background and key concepts
II. European tradition
- Schools of linguistics: Geneva, Prague, Copenhagen
- Other works: Guillaume, Tesnière, Firth
III. American tradition
- Anthropology and linguistics: Boas, Sapir
- Bloomfield: background and key concepts
- Post-Bloomfieldian linguistics
IV. Applications to Philippine languages
Introductory videos

YouTube: Leiden University – Faculty of Humanities

Chapter 4.3: Structuralism, structure and identity


Chapter 4.4: Structuralism, language and world
“A thing’s identity is defined not by its intrinsic properties,
but by the larger structure that it is a part of.”
- 1857-1913, Swiss linguist
- studied and taught in Geneva, Leipzig, Berlin, and Paris

- father of semiotics and structuralism


- semiotics: study of signs and their use in communication
- structuralism: study of relationships among elements in a system

- best known for his “Course on General Linguistics”


- actually a compilation of lecture notes from his students
“Language is not a function of the speaker;
it is a product that is passively assimilated by the individual.”

“Language is a system of interdependent terms


in which the value of each term results solely from
the simultaneous presence of the others.”
- langue vs. parole

- sign = signified + signifier


- signs are arbitrary and differential
- negative knowledge (knowing what it is not)

- synchrony vs. diachrony

- syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic analysis


- organized into several schools of linguistics
- most notable: Geneva, Prague, Copenhagen
- independent works by French and British linguists

- subscribe to Saussure’s concept of language as structure

- frameworks spanning different areas of linguistics


- notable members:
- Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye

- “stylistics,” or technical notion of style


- intellectual and affective components of language
- difference between dictum (content) and modus (presentation)

- parole as “actualization” of “virtual” langue

- relationship between social and individual sides of language


- notable members:
- Vilém Mathesius, Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetzkoy

- phonology
- phonemes as differential units; distinctive-feature analysis

- theory of markedness
- presence or absence of features; extended to morphology, syntax

- linguistic typology and linguistic universals


- structural functionalism
- functions of language (Bühler): cognitive, expressive, instrumental
- expounded by Jakobson, Mathesius, Mukařovský

1. referential
2. poetic
3. emotive
4. conative
5. phatic
6. metalingual
- notable members:
- Louis Hjelmslev, Viggo Brøndal, Hans Jørgen Uldall

- glossematics
- language = content plane + expression plane
- glosseme as smallest meaningful unit
- language is not conveyed through sound
alone (multimodality)
- Gustave Guillaume
- cognitive system (tense, aspect, and mood) in verbs
- psychomechanics (dimensions of language) and word categorization
- Lucien Tesnière
- valency: arguments (subject, object, oblique) of predicate (verb)
- dependency grammar
- John Rupert Firth
- collocation: “You shall know a word by the company it keeps.”
- prosody: syntagmatic components of phonology
- initially founded on anthropological research
- notable figures: Franz Boas, Edward Sapir
- study of indigenous American languages

- Linguistic Society of America


- founded in 1924

- Bloomfieldian structural linguistics


- Leonard Bloomfield: linguistics as a scientific discipline
- Franz Boas
- father of modern anthropology
- published “On Alternating Sounds” (1889) and “Handbook of the
American Indian Languages” (1911)

- Edward Sapir
- classification of American indigenous languages (1929)
- development of the phoneme, distributional analysis
- different languages representing different social realities
- Benjamin Lee Whorf
“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language.”
- 1887-1949, American linguist
- initially studied German and Indo-European philology
- taught at Cincinnati, Illinois, Ohio State, Chicago, and Yale

- important writings include:


- “An Introduction to the Study of Language” (1914)
- “A Set of Postulates for the Science of Language” (1926)
- “Language” (1933)
- “An Introduction to the Study of Language” (1914)
- sentence as analysis of a thought or “total experience”
- Wundt: “analysis into its parts of something that exists as a whole in the
consciousness of the speaker”
- morphology
- existence of “imperfectly separable elements” (e.g. ‘fl-’ in flare, flash, flicker)
- inflection (categorical difference) and derivation (material difference)
- words as semantically independent and recurrent elements, whole concepts
- syntax
- binary groupings of predication and attribution
- cannot entirely be separated from morphology
- review of Saussure (1923)
- psychology is irrelevant to language study
- goal of linguistics: to present the ‘facts of language’ without an
account ‘in terms of mind’

- “Language” (1933)
- sentence as the ‘maximum construction of an utterance’,
a linguistic form which is not part of any larger linguistic form
- words as formally (no longer conceptually) independent elements
- system of “emic” units

lexical grammatical
pheneme phoneme taxeme - primitive feature
glosseme morpheme tagmeme - smallest meaningful unit
noeme sememe episememe - meaning of unit

“John runs” = nominal + verbal + ordering


(tagmeme) (taxeme) (taxeme) (taxeme)
- critique of Bloomfield’s system
- Pike: no clear-cut distinction between taxemes and tagmemes
- Hockett: Bloomfield’s frame of reference did not make sence

- redundancy between lexical and grammatical divisions


- consider “horses” (plural morpheme) vs “men” (plural tagmeme)
- is “horses” plural because it contains a plural component [iz]?
- or is [iz] plural because it is part of a plural construction “horses”?
- Zellig Harris
- discovery procedures for phonemes & morphemes
- linguistics should primarily concern distribution, not meaning
- Charles Francis Hockett
- concepts of “morph” and “allomorph”
- design features of language
- Kenneth Lee Pike
- theory of tagmemics, hierarchical structure
- distinction between “emic” and “etic”
- Bloomfield’s works
- Tagalog texts with grammatical analysis (1917)
- Outline of Ilocano syntax (1942)

- Tagmemes in grammar
- A tagmemic grammar of Ivatan (Hidalgo & Hidalgo, 1971)
- A description of Hiligaynon syntax (Wolfenden, 1975)

- SIL research, PALI Language Texts


Primary references:
R. H. Robins (1997). A Short History of Linguistics. Essex: Addison Wesley Longman Limited.

P. H. Matthews (1993). Grammatical Theory in the United States from Bloomfield to Chomsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

G. Graffi (2015). History of Linguistics Handout 2 – Linguistics in the first half of the 20th century. Available:
http://www.dcuci.univr.it/documenti/OccorrenzaIns/matdid/matdid746212.pdf

L. A. Reid (1981). Philippine linguistics: The state of the art: 1970–1980. In Philippine studies: Political science, economics, and linguistics, ed. by Donn V. Hart,
212-273. Available: https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/33024/1/A22.1981.pdf

Additional references:
L. de Saussure (2006). Geneva School of Linguistics after Saussure. In Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics 2nd ed. 5:24-25. Oxford: Elsevier.

E. P. Hamp, P. Ivić, et al. (2020). Linguistics. In Encyclopædia Britannica. Available: https://www.britannica.com/science/linguistics/The-Prague-school

G. Guillaume (1984). Foundations for a Science of Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

L. Tesnière (1959). Éléments de syntaxe structurale. Paris: Klincksieck.

J. R. Firth (1957). A synopsis of linguistic theory 1930-1955. In Studies in Linguistic Analysis 1:1-32. Oxford: Blackwell.

L. Bloomfield (1926). A set of postulates for the science of language. In Language 2(3):153-164. Available: https://www.jstor.org/stable/408741

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