Structural Linguistics
Encyclopedia
Structural linguistics is an approach to linguistics
originating from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure
. De Saussure's Course in General Linguistics
, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a static system of interconnected units. He is thus known as a father of modern linguistics for bringing about the shift from diachronic to synchronic analysis.
Philosopher Stephen Hicks
describes Structuralism as an outgrowth of European Kant
ianism, which must be considered in relation to Phenomenology:
Structural linguistics thus involves collecting a corpus of utterances and then attempting to classify all of the elements of the corpus at their different linguistic levels: the phoneme
s, morpheme
s, lexical categories
, noun phrase
s, verb phrase
s, and sentence
types.John R. Searle, "Chomsky's Revolution in Linguistics", New York Review of Books, June 29, 1972. One of Saussure's key methods was syntagmatic
and paradigmatic analysis
that respectively define units syntactically and lexically, according to their contrast with the other units in the system.
Structural linguistics is now overwhelmingly regarded by professional linguists as outdated and as superseded by developments such as cognitive linguistics
and generative grammar
: Jan Koster
states, "Saussure, considered the most important linguist of the century in Europe until the 1950s, hardly plays a role in current theoretical thinking about language," while cognitive linguist Mark Turner reports that many of Saussure's concepts were "wrong on a grand scale" and Norman N. Holland notes that "Saussure's views are not held, so far as I know, by modern linguists, only by literary critics, Lacan
ians, and the occasional philosopher;" others have made similar observations.
.
After Saussure, the history of structural linguistics branches off in two directions. First, in America, linguist Leonard Bloomfield's
reading of Saussure's course proved influential, bringing about the Bloomfieldean phase in American linguistics that lasted from the mid 1930s to the mid 1950s. Bloomfield "bracketed" all questions of semantics
and meaning as largely unanswerable, and encouraged a mechanistic approach to linguistics. The paradigm of Bloomfieldean linguistics in American linguistics was replaced by the paradigm of generative grammar
with the publication of Noam Chomsky's
Syntactic Structures
in 1957.
Second, in Europe
, Saussure influenced the Prague School of Roman Jakobson
and Nikolai Trubetzkoy
, whose work would prove hugely influential, particularly concerning phonology
, and the School
of Louis Hjelmslev
. Structural linguistics also had an influence on other disciplines in Europe, including anthropology
, psychoanalysis
and Marxism
, bringing about the movement known as structuralism
.
Linguists who published articles on structuralism include: Leonard Bloomfield
, Charles F. Hockett
, John Lyons
, R. H. Robins
, Otto Jespersen
, Émile Benveniste
, Edward Sapir
, André Martinet
, Thomas Givon, F. R. Palmer, Ferenc Klefer, Robert D. Van Valin, Louis Hjelmslev
, and Ariel Shisha-Halevy.
) or paradigmatic (i.e., as part of a related group). This idea contrasted drastically with the idea that signs can be examined in isolation from a language and stressed Saussure's point that linguistics must treat language synchronically.
Paradigmatic relations are sets of units that exist in the mind, such as the phonological set cat, bat, hat, mat, fat, or the morphological set ran, run, running. The units of a set must have something in common with one another, but they must contrast too, otherwise they could not be distinguished from each other and would collapse into a single unit, which could not constitute a set on its own, since a set always consists of more than one unit. Syntagmatic relations are temporal and consist of a row of units that contrast with one another, like "the man hit the ball" or "the ball was hit by the man". What units can be used in each part of the row is determined by the units that surround them. There is therefore an interweaving effect between syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. But whereas paradigms are always part of the langue
(French for "Language;" or an abstract, Platonic ideal), syntagma can belong to parole ("everyday speech"), and so the linguist must determine how often they have been used before they can be assured that they belong to the latter.
Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations provide the structural linguist with a simple method of categorization for phonology, morphology and syntax. Take morphology, for example. The signs cat and cats are associated in the mind, producing an abstract paradigm of the word forms of cat. Comparing this with other paradigms of word forms, we can note that in the English language the plural often consists of little more than adding an S to the end of the word. Likewise, through paradigmatic and syntagmatic analysis, we can discover the syntax of sentences. For instance, contrasting the syntagma ("I should") and ("Should I?") allows us to realize that in French we only have to invert the units to turn a sentence into a question.
Saussure developed structural linguistics, with its idealized vision of language, partly because he was aware that it was impossible in his time to fully understand how the human brain and mind created and related to language:
maintained that structural linguistics was efficient for phonology and morphology, because both have a finite number of units that the linguist can collect. However, he did not believe structural linguistics was sufficient for syntax, reasoning that an infinite number of sentences could be uttered, rendering a complete collection impossible. Instead, he proposed the job of the linguist was to create a small set of rules that could generate all the sentences of a language, and nothing but those sentences.Chomsky's Revolution in Linguistics Chomsky's critiques led him to found generative grammar
.
One of Chomsky's key objections to structural linguistics was its inadequacy in explaining complex and/or ambiguous sentences. As Searle writes:
By the latter half of the 20th century, many of Saussure's ideas were under heavy criticism. His linguistic ideas are now generally considered important in their time, but outdated and superseded by developments such as cognitive linguistics
. In 1972, Chomsky described structural linguistics as an "impoverished and thoroughly inadequate conception of language," while in 1984, Marcus Mitchell declared that structural linguistics were "fundamentally inadequate to process the full range of natural language
[and furthermore were] held by no current researchers, to my knowledge." Holland writes that it was widely accepted that Chomsky had "decisively refuted Saussure. [...] Much of Chomsky's work is not accepted by other linguists [and] I am not claiming that Chomsky is right, only that Chomsky has proven that Saussure is wrong. Linguists who reject Chomsky claim to be going beyond Chomsky, or they cling to phrase-structure grammars. They are not turning back to Saussure."
In the 1950s as structural linguistics were fading in importance in linguistics, Saussure's ideas were appropriated by several prominent figures in continental philosophy
, and from there were borrowed in literary theory
, where they are used to interpret novels and other texts. However, several critics have charged that Saussure's ideas have been misunderstood or deliberately distorted by continental philosophers and literary theorists. For example, Searle maintains that, in developing his deconstruction
method, Jacques Derrida
altered one of Saussure's key concepts: "The correct claim that the elements of the language only function as elements because of the differences they have from one another is converted into the false claim that the elements [...] are "constituted on" (Derrida) the traces of these other elements."
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
originating from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
. De Saussure's Course in General Linguistics
Course in General Linguistics
Course in General Linguistics is an influential book compiled by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye that is based on notes taken from Ferdinand de Saussure's lectures at the University of Geneva between the years 1906 and 1911...
, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a static system of interconnected units. He is thus known as a father of modern linguistics for bringing about the shift from diachronic to synchronic analysis.
Philosopher Stephen Hicks
Stephen Hicks
Stephen Ronald Craig Hicks is professor of philosophy at Rockford College, where he is also Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship.-Biography:...
describes Structuralism as an outgrowth of European Kant
KANT
KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...
ianism, which must be considered in relation to Phenomenology:
- Neo-Kantianism evolved during the nineteenth century, and by the twentieth century two main forms had emerged. One form was Structuralism, of which Ferdinand de Saussure was a prominent exponent, representing the broadly rationalist wing of Kantianism. The other was Phenomenology, of which Edmund HusserlEdmund HusserlEdmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
was a prominent representative, representing the broadly empiricist wing of Kantianism. Structuralism was a linguistic version of Kantianism, holding that language is a self-contained, non-referential system, and that the philosophical task was to seek out language’s necessary and universal structural features, those features taken to underlie and be prior to the empirical, contingent features of language. Phenomenology’s focus was upon careful examination of the contingent flow of the experiential given, avoiding any existential inferences or assumptions about what one experiences, and seeking simply to describe experience as neutrally and as clearly as possible. In effect, the Structuralists were seeking subjective noumenal categories, and the Phenomenologists were content with describing the phenomena without asking what connection to an external reality those experiences might have.
Structural linguistics thus involves collecting a corpus of utterances and then attempting to classify all of the elements of the corpus at their different linguistic levels: the phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s, morpheme
Morpheme
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
s, lexical categories
Lexical category
In grammar, a part of speech is a linguistic category of words , which is generally defined by the syntactic or morphological behaviour of the lexical item in question. Common linguistic categories include noun and verb, among others...
, noun phrase
Noun phrase
In grammar, a noun phrase, nominal phrase, or nominal group is a phrase based on a noun, pronoun, or other noun-like word optionally accompanied by modifiers such as adjectives....
s, verb phrase
Verb phrase
In linguistics, a verb phrase or VP is a syntactic unit composed of at least one verb and the dependents of that verb. One can distinguish between two types of VPs, finite VPs and non-finite VPs . While phrase structure grammars acknowledge both, dependency grammars reject the existence of a...
s, and sentence
Sentence (linguistics)
In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...
types.John R. Searle, "Chomsky's Revolution in Linguistics", New York Review of Books, June 29, 1972. One of Saussure's key methods was syntagmatic
Syntagmatic analysis
In semiotics, syntagmatic analysis is analysis of syntax or surface structure as opposed to paradigms . This is often achieved using commutation tests ....
and paradigmatic analysis
Paradigmatic analysis
Paradigmatic analysis is the analysis of paradigms embedded in the text rather than of the surface structure of the text which is termed syntagmatic analysis. Paradigmatic analysis often uses commutation tests, i.e...
that respectively define units syntactically and lexically, according to their contrast with the other units in the system.
Structural linguistics is now overwhelmingly regarded by professional linguists as outdated and as superseded by developments such as cognitive linguistics
Cognitive linguistics
In linguistics, cognitive linguistics refers to the branch of linguistics that interprets language in terms of the concepts, sometimes universal, sometimes specific to a particular tongue, which underlie its forms...
and generative grammar
Generative grammar
In theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
: Jan Koster
Jan Koster
Jan Koster is a Dutch linguist, and currently a full professor at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands.He studied at the University of Amsterdam, where, after visiting MIT , he received his PhD in 1978...
states, "Saussure, considered the most important linguist of the century in Europe until the 1950s, hardly plays a role in current theoretical thinking about language," while cognitive linguist Mark Turner reports that many of Saussure's concepts were "wrong on a grand scale" and Norman N. Holland notes that "Saussure's views are not held, so far as I know, by modern linguists, only by literary critics, Lacan
Lacan
Lacan is surname of:* Jacques Lacan , French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist** The Seminars of Jacques Lacan** From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power, a book on political philosophy by Saul Newman** Lacan at the Scene* Judith Miller, née Lacan...
ians, and the occasional philosopher;" others have made similar observations.
History
Structural linguistics begins with the posthumous publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics in 1916, which was compiled from lectures by his students. The book proved to be highly influential, providing the foundation for both modern linguistics and semioticsSemiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
.
After Saussure, the history of structural linguistics branches off in two directions. First, in America, linguist Leonard Bloomfield's
Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics...
reading of Saussure's course proved influential, bringing about the Bloomfieldean phase in American linguistics that lasted from the mid 1930s to the mid 1950s. Bloomfield "bracketed" all questions of semantics
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
and meaning as largely unanswerable, and encouraged a mechanistic approach to linguistics. The paradigm of Bloomfieldean linguistics in American linguistics was replaced by the paradigm of generative grammar
Generative grammar
In theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
with the publication of Noam Chomsky's
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
Syntactic Structures
Syntactic Structures
Syntactic Structures is an seminal book in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1957. It laid the foundation of Chomsky's idea of transformational grammar...
in 1957.
Second, in Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
, Saussure influenced the Prague School of Roman Jakobson
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century...
and Nikolai Trubetzkoy
Nikolai Trubetzkoy
Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy was a Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology...
, whose work would prove hugely influential, particularly concerning phonology
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
, and the School
The Copenhagen school (Linguistics)
The Copenhagen School, officially the "Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen ", was a group of scholars dedicated to the study of structural linguistics founded by Louis Hjelmslev and Viggo Brøndal...
of Louis Hjelmslev
Louis Hjelmslev
Louis Hjelmslev was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family , Hjelmslev studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague and Paris...
. Structural linguistics also had an influence on other disciplines in Europe, including anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
, psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
and Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
, bringing about the movement known as structuralism
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
.
Linguists who published articles on structuralism include: Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics...
, Charles F. Hockett
Charles F. Hockett
Charles Francis Hockett was an American linguist who developed many influential ideas in American structuralist linguistics. He represents the post-Bloomfieldian phase of structuralism often referred to as "distributionalism" or "taxonomic structuralism"...
, John Lyons
John Lyons (linguist)
Sir John Lyons, LittD, FBA is an English linguist, most famous for his work on semantics.John Lyons was educated at St Bede's College, Manchester, and at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he took a degree in Classics in 1953 and a Diploma in Education in 1954. After doing his national service in...
, R. H. Robins
R. H. Robins
Professor Robert H. Robins , affectionately known to his close ones as Bobby Robins, was a British linguist. Before his retirement, he spent his entire career at the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London.Robin's work in...
, Otto Jespersen
Otto Jespersen
Jens Otto Harry Jespersen or Otto Jespersen was a Danish linguist who specialized in the grammar of the English language.He was born in Randers in northern Jutland and attended Copenhagen University, earning degrees in English, French, and Latin...
, Émile Benveniste
Émile Benveniste
Émile Benveniste was a French Jewish structural linguist, semiotician, an apprentice of Antoine Meilletand his successor, who, in his later years, became enlightened by the structural view of language through the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, although he was unwilling to grasp it at first, being...
, Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir was an American anthropologist-linguist, widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the early development of the discipline of linguistics....
, André Martinet
André Martinet
André Martinet was a French linguist, influential by his work on structural linguistics....
, Thomas Givon, F. R. Palmer, Ferenc Klefer, Robert D. Van Valin, Louis Hjelmslev
Louis Hjelmslev
Louis Hjelmslev was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family , Hjelmslev studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague and Paris...
, and Ariel Shisha-Halevy.
Basic theories and methods
The foundation of structural linguistics is a "sign," which in turn has two components: a "signified" is an idea or concept, while the "signifier" is a means of expressing the signified. The "sign" is thus the combined association of signifier and signified. Signs can be defined only in a state of contrast with other signs, in a manner that is either syntagmatic (i.e., syntaxSyntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
) or paradigmatic (i.e., as part of a related group). This idea contrasted drastically with the idea that signs can be examined in isolation from a language and stressed Saussure's point that linguistics must treat language synchronically.
Paradigmatic relations are sets of units that exist in the mind, such as the phonological set cat, bat, hat, mat, fat, or the morphological set ran, run, running. The units of a set must have something in common with one another, but they must contrast too, otherwise they could not be distinguished from each other and would collapse into a single unit, which could not constitute a set on its own, since a set always consists of more than one unit. Syntagmatic relations are temporal and consist of a row of units that contrast with one another, like "the man hit the ball" or "the ball was hit by the man". What units can be used in each part of the row is determined by the units that surround them. There is therefore an interweaving effect between syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. But whereas paradigms are always part of the langue
Langue (linguistics)
Langue and parole are linguistic terms used by Ferdinand de Saussure. Langue describes the social, impersonal phenomenon of language as a system of signs, while parole describes the individual, personal phenomenon of language as a series of speech acts made by a linguistic subject...
(French for "Language;" or an abstract, Platonic ideal), syntagma can belong to parole ("everyday speech"), and so the linguist must determine how often they have been used before they can be assured that they belong to the latter.
Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations provide the structural linguist with a simple method of categorization for phonology, morphology and syntax. Take morphology, for example. The signs cat and cats are associated in the mind, producing an abstract paradigm of the word forms of cat. Comparing this with other paradigms of word forms, we can note that in the English language the plural often consists of little more than adding an S to the end of the word. Likewise, through paradigmatic and syntagmatic analysis, we can discover the syntax of sentences. For instance, contrasting the syntagma ("I should") and ("Should I?") allows us to realize that in French we only have to invert the units to turn a sentence into a question.
Saussure developed structural linguistics, with its idealized vision of language, partly because he was aware that it was impossible in his time to fully understand how the human brain and mind created and related to language:
- Saussure set out to model language in purely linguistic terms, free of psychology, sociology, or anthropology. That is, Saussure was trying precisely not to say what goes on in your or my mind when we understand a word or make up a sentence. [...] Saussure was trying to de-psychologize linguistics.
Criticism
Linguist Noam ChomskyNoam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
maintained that structural linguistics was efficient for phonology and morphology, because both have a finite number of units that the linguist can collect. However, he did not believe structural linguistics was sufficient for syntax, reasoning that an infinite number of sentences could be uttered, rendering a complete collection impossible. Instead, he proposed the job of the linguist was to create a small set of rules that could generate all the sentences of a language, and nothing but those sentences.Chomsky's Revolution in Linguistics Chomsky's critiques led him to found generative grammar
Generative grammar
In theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
.
One of Chomsky's key objections to structural linguistics was its inadequacy in explaining complex and/or ambiguous sentences. As Searle writes:
- ..."John is easy to please" and "John is eager to please" look as if they had exactly the same grammatical structure. Each is a sequence of noun-copula-adjective-infinitive verb. But in spite of this surface similarity the grammar of the two is quite different. In the first sentence, though it is not apparent from the surface word order, "John" functions as the direct object of the verb to please; the sentence means: it is easy for someone to please John. Whereas in the second "John" functions as the subject of the verb to please; the sentence means: John is eager that he please someone. That this is a difference in the syntax of the sentences comes out clearly in the fact that English allows us to form the noun phrase "John's eagerness to please" out of the second, but not "John's easiness to please" out of the first. There is no easy or natural way to account for these facts within structuralist assumptions.
By the latter half of the 20th century, many of Saussure's ideas were under heavy criticism. His linguistic ideas are now generally considered important in their time, but outdated and superseded by developments such as cognitive linguistics
Cognitive linguistics
In linguistics, cognitive linguistics refers to the branch of linguistics that interprets language in terms of the concepts, sometimes universal, sometimes specific to a particular tongue, which underlie its forms...
. In 1972, Chomsky described structural linguistics as an "impoverished and thoroughly inadequate conception of language," while in 1984, Marcus Mitchell declared that structural linguistics were "fundamentally inadequate to process the full range of natural language
Natural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...
[and furthermore were] held by no current researchers, to my knowledge." Holland writes that it was widely accepted that Chomsky had "decisively refuted Saussure. [...] Much of Chomsky's work is not accepted by other linguists [and] I am not claiming that Chomsky is right, only that Chomsky has proven that Saussure is wrong. Linguists who reject Chomsky claim to be going beyond Chomsky, or they cling to phrase-structure grammars. They are not turning back to Saussure."
In the 1950s as structural linguistics were fading in importance in linguistics, Saussure's ideas were appropriated by several prominent figures in continental philosophy
Continental philosophy
Continental philosophy, in contemporary usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and...
, and from there were borrowed in literary theory
Literary theory
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...
, where they are used to interpret novels and other texts. However, several critics have charged that Saussure's ideas have been misunderstood or deliberately distorted by continental philosophers and literary theorists. For example, Searle maintains that, in developing his deconstruction
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...
method, Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
altered one of Saussure's key concepts: "The correct claim that the elements of the language only function as elements because of the differences they have from one another is converted into the false claim that the elements [...] are "constituted on" (Derrida) the traces of these other elements."