Structural Linguistics

Structural linguistics is the approach, founded by Ferdinand de Saussure, that studies a language as a self-contained system of interrelated signs rather than as a collection of historically inherited forms. It treats each linguistic sign as an arbitrary pairing of a sound image and a concept, whose value comes only from its position relative to the other signs in the system, and it separates the abstract shared system of a language, its langue, from any individual speaker's use of it, its parole. The approach dominated linguistics through the first half of the twentieth century, shaping the American descriptive school associated with Leonard Bloomfield, before Noam Chomsky's generative grammar shifted attention toward the rules that generate sentences rather than the system that classifies them.