Chapter 4.3: Structuralism, structure and identity

[Music] structuralism is a movement in the humanities that emphasizes the search for well structure but what does that mean what is structure let's take a look at two simple examples first we take a sentence say the man loves the goat one thing we can do when faced with this sentence is to interpret it to try and find out what it means that's what a hermeneutics is might do but we can also investigate something else namely its grammatical structure then we see that the man loves the goat has the structure subject-verb-object a structure that it shares with a sentence like the man eats the goat even though that sentence has a very different meaning here is another example we take a sonnet by Shakespeare say the famous sonnet 18 shall I compare thee to a summers day again we can analyze the meaning of that sonnet and find out that Shakespeare is telling his friend that he'll make him immortal by writing about him and we can then connect this interpretation with the earlier sonnets in which Shakespeare has encouraged his friends to make himself immortal by getting children but we can also analyze the structure of the poem to find out that it consists of 14 lines grouped in certain ways with a certain rhyme scheme and we can then compare that to the other poems to find out that all of them are structured in the exact same way what these two examples show us are not a right way and a wrong way of proceeding they show us two different ways an approach which is interested in mean and interpretation that we can call her minutest and an approach which is interested in different kinds of structure an approach that we can call structuralist we looked at her Bannu dicks in some of the previous lectures and we will look at structuralism in this lecture and the following one's the man who is often seen as the inventor of structuralism is fairly non de su su a linguist so su that wanted to explain what linguistics the study of language was all about now he thought it was not about applying another science such as history or biology to language you can't do that of course you can study the history of language you can study how talking works in the human body but that is not really linguistics according to the socio linguistics doesn't study the history or the biology of language it studies the structure of language itself so what is the structure of language I already gave the example of grammatical structure which is certainly one example of the structure of language but to understand structuralism it will be more useful to focus on something else to focus on sound and phonemes linguists are of course interested in the different sounds produced by speaker people speaking different languages or dialects and one of the things that they want to do is to specify which sounds exist in which language now you might think that this is basically applied physics you just need to measure the air pressure patterns emerging from people's mouths and then you know what you want to know right well not according to the socio for he points out that linguists are not interested in sounds in general they are interested in sounds insofar as they are relevant for language and that means that they are interested in sounds insofar as they make a difference to meaning this idea of a unit of sound that makes a difference for meaning is what Sosua calls a phoneme take the English words moon and noon they mean something different the moon is a celestial object while noon is a time of day since these are different words it follows that the sounds mmm and hmm belong to different phonemes different linguistically relevant units of sound on the other hand take the English words moon and Moon even though the sound is quite different it's the same word I don't give a different meaning to the word moon just by using a spooky voice so it follows that ooh and ooh belong to the same linguistically relevant unit of sound to the same phoneme we must notice some important things about phonemes first you could never find out about them by doing physics the pressure patterns of mmm are not more dissimilar than the pressure patterns of ooh and ooh your measuring instrument can never tell you that the first belonged to different phonemes and a second to the same phoneme the second thing we should notice is that different languages have different phonemes so for instance in English the sounds grew and belong to different phonemes as we can show with the words God and God a God is a deity Akkad is a fish in Dutch however these sounds also both appear but they belong to the same phoneme the word book trick kunst as a sound book der kunst but we could just as well say the hyper correct book der kunst the meaning wouldn't change and in fact there are no words in Dutch where the difference between good and cut makes a difference in meaning so these two sounds in Dutch belong to the same phoneme the third and most important thing we should notice about phonemes is that their identity is determined not by some paradigmatic example but by the entire structure of phonemes that they are part of now that's a complicated statement so let's unpack it first the identity of a phoneme cannot be determined by a paradigmatic or core example of the phoneme we can't say the ooh phoneme is the sound ooh and everything like it because that doesn't tell us that ooh is still in the phoneme but o is not know the reason that ooh this loud long booming sound belongs to the same phoneme as ooh is that English doesn't have an other phoneme that is sort of like ooh but characterized by being allowed and booming this means that you can basically be as loud and booming as you like with your use you'll never cross over into another phoneme there's nothing there to cross over into so we define phonemes not by examples because that wouldn't work but by describing the boundaries between the different phonemes of a language we explain what the ooh phoneme is by explaining when you cross the boundary from the ooh of moon into the Hall of dot phoneme or the uh of mug phoneme or the oh of boat phoneme and even which is a bit subtle in English the short ooh phoneme of book moon book it's good to be aware of even that last difference because you get a lot less deep credit for Luke I am your father than for Luke I am your father anyway the point is this in order to explain to you what the ooh phoneme in English is I can't just give you some examples of ooh I have to tell you about all the other phonemes that surround the phoneme and I have to indicate the boundaries between those phonemes and the phony this means that the English who phoneme is what it is because it is surrounded by these particular other phonemes if it were surrounded by other phonemes its own boundaries would be different so a phoneme so sewer concludes is what it is because of its place in the whole phonemic structure of the language if you change that structure by removing or changing one phoneme many other phonemes will change as well so even though someone talking English and someone talking Dutch might both make the same ooh sound it is nevertheless the case that the phoneme in English and the you phoneme in Dutch are different are necessarily different because they are part of different structures of phonemes unless all of the phonemes of two languages are the same none of their phonemes will the same now this is one of the central ideas maybe the central idea of structuralism that identity is defined not by intrinsic properties but by the bigger structure that something is a part of as we have seen in this lecture the exact identity of a phoneme is determined by the other phonemes in the language as you will see in the next lecture the exact meaning of a word is determined by its relation to other words in the language and as we will see in the lecture on Vladimir Propp what makes someone a fairytale hero is not that they are strong and smart or any other intrinsic property that is any property that they themselves have by themselves what makes someone a fairytale hero is that they stand in certain relations to a villain and to a princess who needs to be rescued take away the villain and the princess and the hero disappears as well so let's end the lecture by repeating this essential point according to structural ist's something is what it is because of the structure it is part of a thing's identity is determined by its place in a greater whole we'll get to see some of the consequences of that idea very soon you

Channel: Leiden University - Faculty of Humanities

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Length: 12min 47sec (767 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2017