Saussures System For Evaluating Linguistics Essay

In â€Å"Course in General Linguistics†, Saussure does two things to develop his system for evaluating linguistics: he chooses language as his linguistic object and he only incorporates factors into his model that can be said to be true of all languages over all time. The net result is a very high level and flexible classification structure, which is more intent on making a developmental framework for evaluating linguistics than necessarily providing tremendous insight into it’s more concrete aspects: rudiments like structure, meaning, morphology, syntax, or phonology. Others, including Levi- Strauss in â€Å"Structural Anthropology†, have used Saussure’s methodology to develop their own models for study in different aspects of human society. But†¦show more content†¦But I feel he still needed to explicitly say it: ‘that despite all the differences between languages, I have identified these invariants to be true over all time, and I believe this is because of certain specific commonalities between all humans, particularly the human desire to create and maintain an effective and convenient system for communicating ideas with one another.’ Levi-Strauss’ additional step provides a sense of completeness to the process; that is to say that the last step provides the ‘why’ and ‘what’ while Saussure’s method provides the ‘how’. Incorporating the Levi-Strauss step gives us a new line of thought to ponder: engineering and design. Going through the steps: â€Å"Structural Anthropology† first hypothesizes that myths exist to provide people with anecdotes to help explain the unanswerable questions of their society such as life versus death or love, etc. Then Levi- Strauss applies Saussure’s method, designating a mythological object, in this case the myth itself, and then determining a set of invariants true to all myths. The most interesting of these invariants is the use of categories to deconstruct the events of a story into specific event types, which are common across all myths. And finally, Levi- Strauss uses his myth decomposition to draw conclusions about the myth’s moral and, by extension, the society that uses this myth. ThisShow MoreRelatedEssay The Role of the Audiences in Culture2052 Words   |  9 Pagesand structures which we can rely upon to derive meaning (Storey, 2009). These structures include the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axis, where meaning is accumulated on the former and is continual, while meaning is altered on the latter. Langue, a system of language organized by rules and conventions, and parole, an individual utterance or individual use of language (Saussure and Bally et al., 1974), helps us to communicate meaning because we understand and are adept in the use of language. WhileRead MoreThe Importance of Teaching Culture in the Foreign Language Classroom9379 Words   |  38 Pagescorrected, learning that ‘competence counts’ (ibid.). In other words, ‘socioculturally structured associations have to be internalized’ (ibid.)—and, as often as not, these associations vary from culture to culture. Rather than getting bogged down in a ‘linguistic relativity’ debate, the tenets of which are widely known, some consideration should be given to the claim that ‘language is not merely the external covering of a thought; it is also its internal framework. It does not confine itself to expressing