8 - Structural semantics I: semantic fields

Summary

Structuralism

In this section we shall be concerned with the more general principles of what is commonly known, in Europe at least, as structural linguistics*. Unfortunately, the term ‘structuralism’ has acquired a somewhat different, and much narrower, sense in the United States, where it now tends to be employed with reference to the theoretical and methodological principles of the so called post-Bloomfieldian school, which was dominant in American linguistics in the period immediately following the Second World War. Many of the principles of post-Bloomfieldian structuralism were not only alien to, but at variance with, the principles of what we may here refer to (for reasons which will be explained below) as Saussurean* (including post-Saussurean) structuralism. We need not go into all the differences between post-Bloomfieldian and Saussurean structuralism. Most of them are irrelevant in the present context. What must be emphasized, however, in view of the polemical associations which attach to the term ‘structuralism’ in the works of Chomsky and other generative grammarians (cf. 10.5), is that there is, in principle, no conflict between generative grammar and Saussurean structuralism, especially when what we are calling Saussurean structuralism is combined, as it has been in certain interpretations (as we shall see below) with functionalism* and universalism*. In particular, it should be noted that Saussurean structuralists, unlike many of the post-Bloomfieldians (for whom ‘structural semantics’ would have been almost a contradiction in terms), never held the view that semantics should be excluded from linguistics proper.