AHMED QADOURY ABED SUMMARY OF CH 8 OF MATTHEW'S SHORT HISTORY OF STRUCTURAL LINGUISTICS

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STRUCTURALISM IN 2000 AHMED QADOURY ABED
Chapter Eight of Matthews’s (2003)is of dramatic nature to him, since it closed the door of
another edition of Robins’ Short History (1967) due to Robins’ death and to open the door for a third
short survey ,if Lepschy’s is also counted. This chapter ,as Matthews stated in the Preface of his book
,”is a concise history of structural linguistics, charting its development from the 1870s to the present
day. It explains what structuralism was and why its ideas are still central today. For structuralists a
language is a self-contained and tightly organized system whose history is of changes from one state of
the system to another. This idea has its origin in the nineteenth century and was developed in the
twentieth by Saussure and his followers, including the school of Bloomfield in the United States.
Through the work of Chomsky, especially, it is still very influential”.
‘Is structural linguistic still a living movement, and if not when did it die?’ This is the
microproposition of the whole book, where Matthews mentioned many evidences supported the first part
of this question, but little for the latter. Three reasons are behind the ‘death’ of structural linguistics: (1)
the creative phase lasted only two or three decades ;(2)no straightforward definition of structuralism;
and (3)in America particularly ,scholars left their cake and started looking for their portion in Chomsky’
cake. The only justification Matthews and Robins found for these is that since 1970s structural
linguistics has fragmented into virtual sub-disciplines, each with its own objectives.
Matthews has classified scholars into three groups :(1) those who are structuralists till now? (2)
those who ultimately deny their relation to structural linguistics, and (3) those who are in between.
Matthews treatment was concerned with the second group, especially in drawing a comparison between
Saussure’s and Chomsky’s ideas. He started examining Robins’ treatment of structural linguistics by
focusing on the three or four famous dichotomies, and their subsequent influence on linguistics today.
Cours was considered the Bible in this era between the 1920s till 1960s. Following Robins, Matthews
has examined the transition of ideas starting his treatment with the abstraction of ideas of Saussure till
the ‘core language’ of Chomsky, which was defined at a higher level of abstraction. This abstraction was
tackled twice by Matthews : a narrower sense in which both structuralism and generativism are in tune
towards the autonomy of language and a wider sense by seeing language as a system operating
autonomously ,and Chomsky’s theory of parameters or ‘core grammar’ is a good example. Even that he
turned his back to structuralism, Matthews tackled these issues which evidently proved the relatedness
of Chomsky’s ideas on those of Saussure; for example, in his treatment of his ‘competence’, Chomsky
(1965:4) remarked on this relative relatedness of his own with Saussurean ‘la langue’, a situation
described by Joseph (1999:26) as Chomsky ‘unconsciously’ “introduced structuralism into American
linguistics, more fully than any of his predecessors”. But ,in other places , Chomsky and Saussure are
completely different whenever the matter of perfect realization of a language is concerned; Saussure
believed that a language could exist completely only as a ‘social product’ ,while Chomsky was behind
‘I-language’ developed by each speaker. And this argument can be taken as a way of distinction between
Saussurean ‘la langue’ and Chomskyan ‘competence’. Lyons found such relative relatedness a kind of
integration between the two linguists; an integration that inspired the coming (and maybe the
forthcoming) flood of thoughts from the end of the 1960s till now.
A decade before Saussure’s publishings, the notions of ‘utterance’ and ‘the search for language’
was related to Croce who was searching for the ‘the immobility of notion’. He argued that the
foundations of aesthetics and general linguistics are identical ,and would be different if the reality of
language was in the traditional sense of grammar ,not in the living discourse. Bloomfield degisted this
idea to define language as ‘the totality of utterances’, or ‘the body of utterances’ by Firth .Then
Hackett’s definition of language as a system to be inferred from the data of speech., or ‘a set of system

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of habits’ ,which may or may not be seen to betray behaviourist learnings. Chomsky moved away with
his interest in studying speaker-hearer competence regarding it the true object of study.
Bloomfield, Firth, Harris, Chomsky, and many others followed the principles of logical
positives, which one of them was clearly reflected in regarding language a set of relations. Even
Saussure earlier adopted a Wundtan network of opposition and sameness, where linguistic signs were a
set of symmetrical relations. The concept is the same, but the realization is different. Even Matthews and
many others regarded Saussure’s system of values acceptable, but how these values were truly realized
is the question. One answer, for example, was suggested by Bloomfield, and also adopted by his
followers like Firth and Harris. Another answer was suggested by Hjelmslev in the 1940s, and by
Martinet by developing Saussure’ semiology, and then moving away into semiotics ,where no signs of
relatedness to his earlier notion of ‘sign’. Terminology was a matter of doubt and confusion, especially
whether the French or the English sense of ‘sign’ would be adopted. Hockett and Martinet , and later
Matthews used the French one. Not only that ,linguists were different even if one sense was adopted.
Bloomfield stated that his utterance should recur with meanings ,whereas Harris was behind formal
properties. In the 1950s, Saussure’ concept of ‘sign’ was completely replaced by units at an abstract
mediating level, and then developed by a theory of levels proposed by Hockett. This theory found its
way in Chomsky’s scheme of deep and surface structure. Robins and Matthews agreed on one important
point: these examples indicate that units in a language are defined relatively to each other, not
absolutely, and this principle was what common to all schools. Matthews worked hard here to prove the
validity of this principle in phonology and morphology. But in grammar , it is not working since there
are indeed distinctions between form and reference; an issue related to the idiosyncratic aspects of each
language, a slogan raised by structuralists. This ,as Matthews stated ,should not be understood as a call
for looking at ‘conceptual categories’ in each language , but structuralism ,in practice , was a technique
errors like ‘we-ness’ be avoided.
The scope of disagreement became wider in Chomsky’s recent developments,especially in his
Extended Theory where determinate semantic interpretations of sentences with determinate phonetic
representations, as in the two ways of uttering ‘She’s coming’ vs ‘She’s COMing This in turn presupposes
that a language is an independent mental faculty. But, Lepischy (1970:37) got this as a point of positive
relatedness, to the extent to regard Chomsky ‘an hier ‘ of American structuralism. Again, Saussure,
Bloomfield, Hockett, and Martinet worked on the uncertain criterion of abstraction. But Chomsky was
certain, especially in defining grammar as a system of rules that generated a language, and later to
include certain aspects for semantics. And the semantic interpretation was considered the ‘logical form’,
and simultaneously Chomsky also made clear that there were other semantic rules, and other
representations of meaning in a language, that could not be covered by his ‘sentence grammar’. The
latter was developed later with relevance to Universal Grammar, where Matthews described as ‘an
abstraction within an abstraction’. Matthews affirmed that this theory was not a new brand one hundred
percent, but rather ‘a very structuralist theory of how knowledge of a language is acquired’. The added
part ‘is a further specific mental structure, supplemented and corrected by the remainder, which is
determined solely by a series of choices among genetically determined options’. Another issue of
disagreement was the concept of form in structuralism which found its revival in Hjelmselev’ theory of
form ,substance , and purport ,but ,in fact, two major reactions appeared ,namely Greenberg’s and
Fillmore’s.
Thus, linguistics after the 1970s has fragmented into virtual subdisciplines calling for the validity
of their own objectives, which were and still based on both structuralism and generativism . This is the
story we find in every textbook introductions to linguistics ,and the way we learned and teach.