14 - Structuralism in Europe

Summary

Part 1, by Gambarara, Fadda, and Cigana, provides an overview of European structuralism from 1916 to 1966. The authors discuss the binary oppositions in Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics) and the controversy about the representation of Saussure’s ideas in that book. They describe the Geneva school (e.g., Bally, Sechehaye, Frei); the (sociological) French school (e.g., Meillet, Benveniste, Martinet, Mounin); and the Copenhagen school of glossematics (e.g., Jespersen, Brøndal, Hjelmslev, Fischer-Jørgensen). They mention other scholars in Europe, the UK, and the USA who were part of this new trend and chronicle structuralism in the humanities/human sciences (e.g., Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida, Piaget), including semiology/semiotics (Barthes, Greimas, Eco).

Part 2, by Sériot, discusses the functional structuralism of the Prague Linguistic Circle (PLC) during its ‘classical’ period (1926-39). It describes the 1929 PLC Thèses, the adaptation of Saussurian terminology to the Praguians’ own ends, functionalism (the purpose of language for communication), the difference between ‘poetic language’ and ‘language of communication,' the notion of language unions, Mathesius’s functional sentence perspective, literary language and language culture, and, especially, phonology (Trubetzkoy and Jakobson) vs. phonetics, e.g., types of phonological systems and oppositions, markedness, binarism, distinctive features, and child language acquisition.