ABSTRACT
Originally, structuralism seemed like a methodological attempt to extend to other social sciences the benefits of the ‘structuralist’ revolution which had been happening in linguistics. Classical philology had mainly applied itself to the ‘historical’ description of languages in their different elements (vocabulary, syntax, etc.). On the other hand, ‘structuralist’ linguistics aimed to analyse the ‘structure’ of language. The example of phonology allows us to illustrate simply what is
meant by the notion of structure (cf. ‘Structure’) in this context. ‘Classical’ phonology aims at distinguishing different phonemes (elementary sounds in a language). Eventually, it attempts to describe the evolution of these phonemes historically and their variation from one part of a country to the other; for example, to compare a set of German phonemes with French ones, etc. ‘Structuralist’ phonology aims on the other hand to prove that the whole set of a language’s phonemes makes up a coherent ‘system’, able to offer a ‘convenient’ and economical framework to the communication process. Let us take English phonemes. According to Jakobson, they are all made from the combination of twelve ‘distinct’ binary and elementary ‘traits’: ‘vocalic/not vocalic’, ‘consonantal/ non-consonantal’, ‘flat/sharp’, ‘nasal/ oral’, ‘long/short’, etc. These twelve dual traits can in theory allow 212=4,096 combinations of possible phonemes. In practice, most languages (one of them English) use only a few dozen phonemes altogether. Of course, the real phonemes are not a haphazard ‘selection’ of possible phonemes: they represent a ‘system’ of combinations of elementary distinctive traits, the structure of which structural phonology sets out to analyse precisely, (cf. ‘Structure’, ‘System’).
