STRUCTURALISM: AN INTRODUCTION
Structuralism is an intellectual movement which began in France in the 1950s. its essence is
the belief that things cannot be understood in isolation - they have to be seen in the context of
the larger structures they are part of. Structuralism was imported into Britain mainly in the
1970s and attained widespread influence throughout the 1980s. Structuralists are not so much
interested in the operations of a single entity as they are in trying to describe the underlying
(and not necessarily visible) principles by which it exists.
Structure & its properties
We should take a moment to consider how structuralism defines the word structure.
Structures aren’t physical entities; they’re conceptual frameworks that we use to organize and
understand physical entities. A structure is any conceptual system that has the following three
properties:
(1) wholeness, (2) transformation, and (3) self-regulation.
Wholeness simply means that the system functions as a unit; it’s not
merely a collection of independent items. The whole is different from the sum
of its parts because the parts working together create something new. To use a
physical example, water is a whole that is different from its component parts
(hydrogen and oxygen).
Transformation means that the system is not static; it’s dynamic, capable of change.
For example, language, a structural system, is capable of transforming its basic components
(phonemes) into new utterances (words and sentences).
Self-regulation means that the transformations of which a structure is
capable never lead beyond its own structural system. The elements created
by transformations (for example, new linguistic utterances) always belong to the
system and obey its laws.
Ferdinand de Saussure
Structuralist approach to language caused a significant departure from the traditional
methods of study practiced by nineteenth-century philologists, who had examined language
diachronically—that is, by tracing how words evolved in meaning or sound over time. In
contrast, Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), who is generally regarded as
the father of modern linguistics, began to use a synchronic approach, a method that based on
scientific study of language. It involves looking at a language at one particular time in search
of the principles that govern its functions, principles of which its users might not even be
consciously aware. As explained in Course in General Linguistics (1972), he looked for the
foundational system of language by observing its surface uses.
Langue & Parole
Saussure’s studies led him to reject the idea that language is simply a tool to be used to
represent a pre-existent reality. Instead, he argued that language is a system that has its own
internal rules of operations. He called those general rules langue, and he referred to the
applications that members of a particular speech community make of those rules
in their speech as parole. In other words, langue, sometimes referred to as a grammar, is the
system within which individual verbalizations have meaning, and parole refers to the
individual verbalizations. The rules of langue, which the individual speaker absorbs as a
member of a culture, are manifested in parole.
Signifier & Signified
One of the concepts important to Saussure’s explanation of the language system is
that of signs, which he describes as being composed of two parts: a written or sound
construction, known as the signifier, and its meaning, called the signified. The spoken or
written form of hat, for example, is a signifier. The concept that flashes into your mind when
you hear or read it is the signified. With the introduction of these terms, and the theory
underlying them, Saussure transformed the sense of what a word is. He made it no longer
possible to speak of a word as a symbol that represents a thing outside of it, as it had
conventionally been known. Because a signifier does not refer to some object in the world but
to a concept in the mind, it is language, and not the world external to us, that mediates our
reality.
Characteristics of signifier and signified relationship
The connection between the signifier and the signified has several important characteristics.
First of all, it is not a natural relationship but an arbitrary one. The signifier hat has no
inherent link with the physical object you wear on your head. It could just as easily have been
called a rose or a bed. Then how do a signifier and a signified become tied together? The
relationship comes about through convention, an agreement on the part of speakers that the
two are associated. Finally, we know one sign from another not because of meanings they
inherently carry but because of the differences among them. The signifier bat is
distinguishable from hat, for example, because they have different initial letters. Words
cannot be defined in isolation, because they exist as a chain formed by relationships with
other words. Language, then, is arbitrary, conventional, and based on difference.
Conclusion
Thus, in the structuralist approach to literature there is a constant movement away from the
interpretation of the individual literary work and a parallel drive towards understanding the
larger, abstract structures which contain them.