structural (adj.)

A term used in LINGUISTICS referring to any approach to the analysis of LANGUAGE that pays explicit attention to the way in which linguistic features can be described in terms of STRUCTURES and SYSTEMS (structural or structuralist linguistics). In the general SAUSSUREAN sense, structuralist ideas enter into every school of linguistics. Structuralism does, however, have a more restricted definition, referring to the BLOOMFIELDIAN emphasis on the processes of SEGMENTING and CLASSIFYING the physical features of UTTERANCE (i.e. on what Noam Chomsky later called SURFACE STRUCTURES), with little reference to the abstract UNDERLYING structures (Chomsky’s DEEP STRUCTURES) of language or their MEANING. It is this emphasis which the CHOMSKYAN approach to language strongly attacked; for GENERATIVE linguistics, accordingly, the term is often pejorative.

The contribution of this notion in linguistics is apparent in the more general concept of structuralism, especially as formulated in the work of the French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908), and others. Here, any human institution or behavior (e.g. dancing, courtship, religion) is considered analyzable in terms of an underlying network of relationships, and the structures demonstrated referrable to basic modes of thought. The crucial point is that the elements which constitute a network have no validity apart from the relations (of equivalence, contrast, etc.) which hold between them, and it is this network of relations which constitutes the structures of the system.

Within linguistics, ‘structural’ will be found in several contexts in PHONOLOGY, GRAMMAR and SEMANTICS. Structural(ist) grammar, as a general term, is now a largely dated conception of grammatical analysis, though the emphases which characterized it may still be seen in several areas of APPLIED LINGUISTIC studies (e.g. in the structural drills of foreign-language teaching), and the term ‘structural’ is often given a special status as part of the exposition of a grammatical MODEL, e.g. the notion of STRUCTURAL DESCRIPTION in TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR. Structural semantics is an influential contemporary position, which is still in its early stages of analyzing the sense relations that interconnect LEXEMES and SENTENCES.