[1][2] It is derived from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and is part of the overall approach of structuralism.
Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a dynamic system of interconnected units.
Other key features of structuralism are the focus on systematic phenomena, the primacy of an idealized form over actual speech data, the priority of linguistic form over meaning, the marginalization of written language, and the connection of linguistic structure to broader social, behavioral, or cognitive phenomena.
[6][7] Saussure himself made a modification of August Schleicher's language–species analogy, based on William Dwight Whitney's critical writings, to turn focus to the internal elements of the language organism, or system.
[8] Nonetheless, structural linguistics became mainly associated with Saussure's notion of language as a dual interactive system of symbols and concepts.
Structuralist linguistics is often thought of as giving rise to independent European and American traditions due to ambiguity in the term.
Nevertheless, Wundt's ideas had already been imported from Germany to American humanities by Franz Boas before him, influencing linguists such as Edward Sapir.
[16] Structural linguists like Hjelmslev considered his work fragmentary because it eluded a full account of language.
In the generative or Chomskyan concept, a purported rejection of 'structuralism' usually refers to Noam Chomsky's opposition to the behaviourism of Bloomfield's 1933 textbook Language; though, coincidentally, he is also opposed to structuralism proper.
Syntagmatic relations, in contrast, are concerned with how units, once selected from their paradigmatic sets of oppositions, are 'chained' together into structural wholes.
Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations provide the structural linguist with a tool for categorization for phonology, morphology and syntax.
We thus take syntagmatic evidence (difference in structural configurations) as indicators of paradigmatic relations (e.g., in the present case: questions vs. assertions).
[20] The structural approach in humanities follows from 19th century Geist thinking which is derived from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophy.
[9] This can be contrasted with functional explanation which explains linguistic structure in relation to the "adaptation" of language to the community's communicative needs.
Building on the smallest meaningful and non-meaningful elements, glossemes, it is possible to generate an infinite number of productions: These notions are a continuation in a humanistic tradition which considers language as a human invention.
A similar idea is found in Port-Royal Grammar: Another way to approach structural explanation is from Saussure's concept of semiology (semiotics).
Event-related Potential (ERP) studies have found that language processing is based on the interaction of syntax and semantics rather than on innate grammatical structures.
[36][37] Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) studies have found that the child's brain is shaped differently depending on the structural characteristics of their first language.
[39] It is argued that Functional Grammar, deriving from Saussure, is compatible with the view of language that arises from brain research and from the cross-linguistic study of linguistic structures.
For example, Mitchell Marcus writes that structural linguistics was "fundamentally inadequate to process the full range of natural language".
Gilbert Lazard has dismissed the Chomskyan approach as passé while applauding a return to Saussurean structuralism as the only course by which linguistics can become more scientific.
[48] In the 1950s Saussure's ideas were appropriated by several prominent figures in continental philosophy, anthropology, and from there were borrowed in literary theory, where they are used to interpret novels and other texts.