Structural Linguistics. The wheel had come full
circle. The search for a complete explanation of the
history of language had again brought the linguists face
to face with the living language. The main theorist
of this development is the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure. He made his mark as a leading Junggram-
matiker, but is important above all for his work on
general linguistics, which was published posthumously
by his pupils in 1916 as Cours de linguistique générale.
Language, says Saussure, has a double face. On one
hand it manifests itself as parole (“speech”), which is
the actual performance of speakers when they speak
or write. On the other hand, it is also langue (“lan-
guage”), which represents the knowledge or compe-
tence that all speakers possess of their language. All
changes in language occur in parole, in the actual
speech act. But only some of these changes become
institutionalized in langue.
Language can be studied in two ways, either dia-
chronically, following its changes through time, or
synchronically, analyzing its condition at a given mo-
ment. Nineteenth-century linguistics had considered
mainly the diachronic aspect. Saussure stressed the
primacy of the synchronic view. A complete diachrony
could only be achieved by comparing not only isolated
facts, like sounds, but the whole state of the language
at one period with that prevailing at another. Saussure
insisted on the systematic nature of language. Language
is a structure, a functioning whole in which the differ-
ent parts are determined by one another. In fact, no
linguistic sign means anything by itself: it only acquires
value by being distinguished from other signs in the
language.
These ideas of Saussure's were taken up by several
other linguists, especially outside Germany, where the
historical school continued to be strong. Among them
we may mention L. Hjelmslev, the founder of the
Danish glossematic school, and the Russian prince
N. S. Troubetskoy, one of the founders of the Prague
school of phonology in the 1930's. Applying Saussure's
idea of language as a system of values, Troubetskoy
turned his attention to the distinctive function of the
language sounds. The linguist, whose chief concern was
langue rather than parole, should investigate to what
extent phonetic differences were used in the language
in order to distinguish one linguistic sign from another.
Thus the concept of the phoneme was born.
The methods used for the establishment of the ele-
mentary linguistic unit, the phoneme, were later car-
ried over to work on the smallest meaningful element
in the language, the morpheme, especially in America,
where Leonard Bloomfield was the leading figure. On
the whole, the ideas launched by Saussure, and their
successful application above all in phonology, led to
an increased methodological awareness among the
linguists in the period between the two world wars
and after. The success of nineteenth-century diachronic
linguistics had to a large extent been due to the consis-
tent use of the concept of “sound law.” It was felt
that twentieth-century synchronic linguistics also
needed a leading principle around which to organize
its work.
