Structural linguistics

If the nineteeth century was an era of comparative and historical philology, the twentieth century saw a decisive shift in favour of descriptive or synchronic linguistics. Where German scholars had led the way in the previous century, the emergent twentieth-century academic discipline was to be dominated by Americans. But the man often seen as the father of what became known as structural lingustics, our focus in this chapter, was in fact a Swiss. The work of Ferdinand de Saussure, whose thinking underpins most work undertaken in this century and the last, merits consideration in some detail, as many of the dichotomies with which he is associated – langue/parole; syntagmatic/paradigmatic; signifiant/signifié – have become part of the conceptual toolkit not just of linguistics but also of structuralist approaches to literature and social sciences.

In this chapter we examine the Course in General Linguistics with which Saussure is associated, the concepts it introduced and their relevance to contemporary linguistic thought. We then consider the legacy of Saussure’s thinking in the work of the North American Descriptivists, who established linguistics as a respectable academic discipline partly by breaking away from universal models based on Classical European languages and treating each language as a system in its own right. From this relativist position emerged what became known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – the suggestion that languages actually mould the world view of their speakers to a very significant degree – which we assess at the end of the chapter.

Saussure and the Course in General Linguistics

Saussure was born in Geneva in 1857, and entered the University of Geneva in 1875 as a student of physics and chemistry, before switching his attention to Classical languages and later moving to study Indo-European at Leipzig where, aged just 21, he published his dissertation ‘Memoir on the Primitive System of Vowels in Indo-European Languages’, to considerable acclaim. Thereafter he enjoyed further success in Paris, where he stayed until 1891, when he returned to Geneva to take up a Chair.

The work for which Saussure is best known, however, was not published in his lifetime, nor indeed written by Saussure himself. The Course in General Linguistics (henceforth Course), which has been likened to a Copernican revolution in the discipline, opens with a brief summary of the history of linguistics, in which Saussure identifies three stages:

• The first, beginning with the Greeks, he defines as the ‘grammar’ stage, which he sees as essentially prescriptive and unscientific.

• The second, ‘philological’ stage he dates from the work of Friedrich Wolf in 1777, and again sees as not purely linguistic in intention, focused as it was on elucidating texts written in different periods.

• The third, and for Saussure the most interesting stage (the first two are dismissed in little more than a page), is that of comparative philology, which he dates from the work of Franz Bopp in 1816. Saussure’s critique of the comparative school, as he calls it, echoes the concerns raised in his letter to Meillet (see Case study on next page): it had failed to define the nature of its study, and in its endeavour to establish relations between languages had paid scant attention to the nature of words as representative signs.

Figure 3.1: Ferdinand de Saussure

Case study: Genesis of the Course

In spite of his success as a philologist, Saussure shows signs of dissatisfaction with the contemporary methods and even the terminology of linguistics from an early stage. In the frustration he expresses in a letter to the eminent French linguist Antoine Meillet in 1894, we see the germ of the work that would make him famous (see Culler 1976: 15):

‘but I am fed up with all that, and with the general difficulty of writing even ten lines of good sense on linguistic matters. For a long time I have been above all preoccupied with the logical classification of linguistic facts and with the classification of the points of view from which we treat them; and I am more and more aware of the immense amount of work that would be required to show the linguist what he is doing…‘The utter inadequacy of current terminology, the need to reform it and, in order to do that, to demonstrate what sort of object language is, continually spoils my pleasure in philology, though I have no dearer wish than not to be made to think about the nature of language in general. This will lead, against my will, to a book in which I shall explain, without enthusiasm or passion, why there is not a single term used in linguistics which has any meaning for me. Only after this, I confess, will I be able to take up my work at the point I left off.’

The book to which Saussure refers was eventually published, but only after his death. Compiled posthumously by Saussure’s students from his Geneva lecture notes from three courses taught between 1906 and 1911, and edited by two of Saussure’s colleagues, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger, the Course in General Linguistics (Cours de Linguistique Générale) was published in 1916, three years after his death, and has had far-reaching repercussions for linguistic study ever since.

The nature of the linguistic sign

Saussure defines language as a system of signs, his conception of which takes up much of Part I of the Course. The sign for Saussure consists of two elements: a signifier (signifiant) and a signified (signifié), both of which are arbitrary. The arbitrariness of the signifier is not a difficult concept to grasp. As a native speaker of English, when I see an animal barking I call it a dog, but there is no reason why it should be called a dog: if there were, all languages would have discovered this and given this animal the same name, rather than selecting such different terms as ci (Welsh), perro (Spanish), Hund (German) or mbwa (Swahili).

Figure 3.2: The linguistic sign (Course, p. 66)

The absence of any link between the word and its referent in the real world is almost universal, the one class of exceptions being onomatopoeic words, where a word echoes a sound associated with the referent in question, as for example in cuckoo. Even for onomatopoeic words, however, there is a large measure of arbitrariness: cuckoos are called ‘cuckoos’ only in English, and to return to our canine example above, there is a remarkable divergence cross-linguistically even in the way barking is represented in print: English dogs go woof! woof! while French ones go ouah! ouah! and Russian ones gav! gav! in spite of the fact that there are no linguistic differences (to the best of our knowledge) between dogs of different nationalities. (This observation has spawned a number of websites and even a Wikipedia page, which you may like to check out for yourself.)

Key idea: The signifier and the signified

The linguistic sign unites an arbitrary signifier (signifiant) with an arbitrary signified (signifié).

The arbitrariness of the signifier, however, is only part of the story: Saussure stresses that the signified too is arbitrary, as each language divides up the world in its own way. A consequence of the conceptual arbitrariness of the signified is that precise translation between languages often proves impossible. Swedish, for example, has no single word for grandmother, making a distinction between mormor (‘mother mother’) and farmor (‘father mother’), which English does not. Some concepts seem to elude translation altogether (see Case study on next page) and, as we shall see in Chapter 9, even concepts as familiar as colour terms turn out to be highly language-specific. A second consequence of arbitrariness is that both signifier and signified are subject to change: the silent letters of _k_now or thou_gh_ in English attest to a time when the pronunciation of both words was different; Old English þing once meant ‘discussion’ but came to mean thing, while the word man originally meant ‘person’ but acquired the meaning ‘male person’, an etymology which leads some people to object to terms such as chairman as gender-exclusive.

Key idea: Synchronic v diachronic

Saussure insisted on the separation of synchronic facts (describing the language at a particular point in time) from diachronic ones (relating to changes which have taken place in the language), on the grounds that a native speaker does not need to know the history of his/her language to speak and understand it.

While the study of language change, a major preoccupation of the nineteenth-century comparative philologists, is of interest and value in itself, Saussure warned against confusing synchronic approaches (studying the language as a system at a single point in time) and diachronic ones (focusing on changes in the language system). Saussure accorded priority to the former, using a chess analogy to distinguish the two perspectives.

Case study: Gezelligheid and the arbitrariness of the signified

The Dutch term gezellig \[xə'zεƖəx] is frequently cited as an example of a concept which cannot be translated. The website DutchAmsterdam.com attempts thus to convey its meaning to anglophone visitors:

Locals and foreigners alike will tell you that the word cannot be translated. Its meaning includes everything from cozy to friendly, from comfortable to relaxing, and from enjoyable to gregarious. According to Wikipedia,

‘A perfect example of untranslatability is seen in the Dutch language through the word gezellig, which does not have an English equivalent. Literally, it means cozy, quaint, or nice, but can also connote time spent with loved ones, seeing a friend after a long absence, or general togetherness.’

However, to the Dutch it goes way beyond ‘cozy’. You’ll hear the word a lot when you visit Amsterdam, so here are some tips how to understand and use it:

_Gezellig_ vs. not _gezellig_

A brown café is gezellig. A dentist’s waiting room is not – though it can be gezellig if your friends accompany you, particularly if they are gezellig. An evening on the town with friends is gezellig, especially if you have dinner at a gezellig restaurant, see a good movie, and finish with a drink at a gezellige pub. Trying to entertain the in-laws from hell is definitely not gezellig.

For Saussure, Grimm had failed to distinguish between diachronic changes and the functions given to new elements in the resulting language system. Thus the vowel alternations foot: feet; goose: geese; tooth: teeth emerged as the result of a purely phonetic change which was used by the system to designate singular and plural: it did not happen in order to represent the plural, as if ‘plural’ were a slot to be filled and the language developed a new form in order to fill it. Sound changes are ‘blind’ but have consequences for the system as a whole: for example, the change in British English which saw the wh- sound \[ʍ] pronounced like \[w] had the consequence that such word pairs as which/witch, whales/Wales and while/wile are no longer distinguished by most British English speakers.

Spotlight: Saussure and chess

On two occasions in the Course, Saussure likens language to a game of chess. Highlighting the difference between synchrony and diachrony, he invites the reader to imagine a game in progress, and notes that a person who recalls the moves that led to the current state of play has no advantage, in playing the game, over a person who has turned up in the last two minutes. In the same way, a speaker does not need to know about previous states of his/her mother tongue to speak it fluently. Saussure suggests, however (Course, p. 89), that the analogy breaks down in one important respect: while chess moves result from the volition of a player trying to secure a win, no such teleology, or change directed towards a particular outcome, is at work in the case of language change. In Saussure’s words, ‘language premeditates nothing’.

In another chess analogy, Saussure points out that the different chess pieces in themselves are unimportant: it matters little if the two rooks or bishops are not of identical shape, provided they are sufficiently different from other pieces to be distinguished from them. If, say, the knight were lost, he says, ‘even a figure shorn of any resemblance to a knight can be declared identical provided the same value is attributed to it’ (p. 110). In fact, a problem would only arise if the figure chosen were insufficiently different from another piece – say, a bishop – to be distinguished from it, in which case the game would be fundamentally altered.

Saussure also stated, famously, that ‘language is form, not substance’, and that language is a system of relations with no positive terms, only differences. To understand Saussure’s insights here, it is worth dwelling on these claims, both of which stem from our earlier principle of the arbitrariness of the sign:

it is understood that the concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by their relations with the other terms of the system. Their most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not.Course, p. 117

Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms.Course p. 120

To illuminate the notion of linguistic entities without an essence of their own, Saussure asks us to consider a railway timetable. We are prepared to accept, he says, that the 8.25 Geneva to Paris express which leaves each day is ‘the same train’ in spite of the fact that its coaches, driver and locomotive are probably not the same each day: we would continue to call it the ‘8.25 Geneva to Paris’ train even if it left a few minutes late now and again. We do so because the inherent qualities of the train itself do not matter: what matters is the fact that this train is not the 10.25 to Paris, or the 8.25 to Bern.

Saussure’s concept of linguistic values is based on differences: if we wish to learn the meaning of the word blue we need to know how it differs from red, green, yellow, etc.: there is no inherent concept of ‘blueness’ which will leap out at us and enable us to understand the concept. Similarly, we can only understand dog by virtue of its contrast with cat, horse, elephant, etc., without which dog would mean little more than animal. The importance of difference is even clearer in the case of speech sounds. There will almost certainly be slight differences each time we produce a b sound in a word like bit, and differences again between our own pronunciation and that of others. Yet all these different realizations will be recognized by English speakers as ‘the same’, in the same way that a teacher will recognize the many different handwritten b’s he/she might see in 30 Year 6 homework assignments as ‘the same letter’. It matters not if a Year 6 child occasionally puts a smiley in the round part of the ‘b’, gives it a moustache or draws sunglasses on the stalk: it will remain recognizably b unless and until it ceases to be distinct from other letters and starts to be confused with, say, d, with the result that the pairs bid/did, bad/dad, big/dig and so on are no longer distinguishable.

Key idea: The structuralist perspective

From a structuralist perspective, language has no positive terms: it depends at every level on meaningful contrasts or oppositions.

If in language ‘there are only differences’, then it is the relations between elements in the system, rather than the elements themselves, which are meaningful, and Saussure suggests that these relations are of two kinds. The first, syntagmatic relations, represent the combinatorial possibilities a language permits: adjectives may qualify nouns in English, for example (a green coat) but not verbs (\_to green try_); adverbs may qualify verbs (_go boldly/boldly go_) but not nouns (\boldly tree/\*tree boldly).

Paradigmatic relations, by contrast, concern the range of elements that can be substituted in the same environment. For example, in the sentence John built a house we could replace John with another proper noun such as Peter or Mary, by a noun phrase such as the little old man or (in a fictional parallel universe) the giant slug in evening dress. Similarly, we could replace built with build, constructed, destroys, is destroying, admires and so on. At the phonological level, the first sound /p/ of pit stands in opposition to all the other sounds which could replace it to produce other words, e.g. kit, sit, mitt, fit, lit, nit.

A final important dichotomy for Saussure was that of _langue_ and _parole_, meaning respectively the abstract language system and the concrete instantiation of that system in speech. For Saussure, the real object of study for the linguist was langue, but our only access to it is via parole, with all its hesitations, slips of the tongue, false starts and so on. He saw the difference between the two exemplified in the contrast between phonetics, the study and description of speech sounds, and phonology, the study of sound systems in language (which we explore in Chapters 4 and 5 respectively). Strongly influenced by the sociologist Emile Durkheim, Saussure saw langue as a social phenomenon, implanted in the individual, who may through his/her own parole initiate or adopt change in langue.

Key idea: The language system

Langue (the language system) is based on relations of two kinds:

•  syntagmatic, or combinatorial relations between elements•  paradigmatic relations, involving items of the same category which can be substituted for each other in a given environment.

The North American Descriptivists

Saussure’s emphasis on language as a structure, rather than on its individual elements, led to the adoption of the term structuralism, the importance of which in modern linguistic thinking is difficult to overemphasize. Robins (1997: 225) has gone so far as to say that ‘the structural approach to language underlies virtually the whole of modern linguistics’. His concept of distinctive oppositions, and notably that of the phoneme as a distinctive speech unit (see Chapter 5), was later developed and refined in the 1920s and 1930s by the Prague School Linguists, including Nikolai Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson. They also explored the causes of sound change, on which the Neogrammarians had been largely silent, from a structural point of view: phonemic mergers might, for example, be seen to decrease complexity within the system and thereby reduce effort from the speaker’s point of view (though the question of why a change happens at a particular time would not be addressed until the advent of variationist sociolinguistics: see Chapter 11).

It was, however, in the United States, between the 1920s and 1950s, that linguistics became established as an autonomous academic discipline. The direction for the subject was set by a group which came to be known as the North American Descriptivists, whose major figures include Leonard Bloomfield, Martin Joos, Henry Gleason, Charles Hockett and Zellig Harris; two important contemporaries, Edward Sapir and Franz Boas, came to linguistics from an anthropological background. Bloomfield above all is credited with achieving respectability for linguistics as a science, a central Descriptivist concern. His seminal 1933 work Language, which remains a highly readable introduction to the subject even today, attempts to bring the scientific rigour of the natural sciences to linguistics through detailed description of methodology and discovery procedures, and reflections on corpora and sample sizes.

The need to justify linguistics as a science resulted in an emphasis on those aspects of language which could readily be described and presented in terms of rules (notably at the phonological and morphological levels: see Chapters 5 and 6), and a consequent downgrading of those which could not, notably semantics, in which Bloomfield saw no imminent prospect of scientific progress:

The study of language can be conducted without special assumptions so long as we pay no attention to the meaning of what is spoken.(Bloomfield 1933: 75)

Where nineteenth-century linguists had taken their inspiration from advances in natural history, the Descriptivists looked to the logical rigour of mathematics in the description of rule-governed linguistic behaviour:

But of all the sciences and near-sciences which deal with human behavior, linguistics is the only one which is in a fair way to becoming completely mathematical, and the other social scientists are already beginning to imitate the strict methods of the linguists.(Joos 1957: 350)

Mathematics is a good place to turn for analogs of structures… A good many mathematical systems are characterizable wholly or partly as consisting of elements for which certain relations are defined.(Hockett 1957: 394)

For the Descriptivists, a scientific approach demanded reliance on publicly observable linguistic data, the goal at this stage being to describe rather than to explain.

We do not answer ‘why’ questions about the design of a language… we try to describe precisely; we do not try to explain. Anything in our description that sounds like explanation is simply loose talk… and is not part of current linguistic theory.(Joos 1957: 349)

The emphasis on description reflected a desire to shed some decidedly unscientific prejudices from the past, notably the assumption that all languages were, in essence, structured along similar lines to the Classical languages (or, worse, that they ought to be). Such beliefs were flatly contradicted by the material with which the Descriptivists generally worked: an aspiring doctoral student in the interwar years would typically be required to provide a description of the grammar and phonology of an (often obsolescent) native American language, for which a Classical or European language model was of little help. The Descriptivists’ approach, which stems directly from Saussure’s conception of language as a system of relations, was to establish observable regularities of form within their data sets or corpora (singular: corpus), and describe the distribution of each element:

…the total of all environments in which it occurs, i.e. the sum of all the (different) positions or occurrences of an element relative to the occurrence of other elements.(Harris 1951: 15–16)

THE SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS

The Descriptivists dismissed anything but the description of languages in their own terms as unhelpful speculation – ‘loose talk’ in Joos’s words – and emphasized linguistic diversity rather than universal principles. From this firmly relativist position emerged what became known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, after Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf, though it was not actually formalized in their lifetimes. This hypothesis held that languages were not only all structurally different, but that individuals’ fundamental perception of reality is moulded by the language they speak. Consider an early statement to this effect from Sapir:

…the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.(Sapir 1929: 209)

He would later describe language as something that ‘defines experience for us’ and talk of the ‘tyrannical hold that linguistic form has upon our orientation in the world’. Sapir’s student, Benjamin Lee Whorf, claimed that the Hopi language of Arizona encoded a very different world view from that of what he called the ‘Standard Average European’, notably with respect to the expression of time. Hopi, he claimed, ‘may be called a timeless language’: its verbs lacked tense marking comparable to that of European languages, and there were neither terms for countable temporal units (days, hours, minutes) nor spatial metaphors to express time reference (cf. _between_ the sheets/_between_ 8pm and 10pm; _in_ the water/_in_ the afternoon). All this reflected for Whorf a concept of time that was radically different from those with which Standard Average Europeans are familiar. Echoing his mentor, he famously concluded:

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language(Whorf 1956: 212–13)

Critics of Whorf have noted that his claims as they stand are not testable: the Hopi concept of time might in fact be similar to those of Europeans, but merely expressed in a very different way. Another objection is that it is difficult to see how a world view shaped by one’s language can change, because individuals would not be able to think outside the categories that language provides. Yet human beings can and do change their perspectives on the world, understand concepts from other languages and create new ones. We are hardly, then, ‘prisoners’ of our language, as the hypothesis would have us believe:

Sapir and Whorf understimate the ability that individual men possess to break conceptual fetters which other men have forged.(Sampson 1980: 102)

Other objections challenge the relativist position of Sapir and Whorf, according to which each language must be viewed strictly on its own terms. They argue instead for innate or universal conceptual categories (see Chapter 8). But while most linguists would now, for a variety of reasons, reject the strong version of the hypothesis, many would nonetheless accept a weaker version, which sees language as subtly influencing our modes of thought (see Spotlight on next page). The highly developed system of honorific registers in Japanese, for example, reflects a socially stratified society in which relative social status is important, but it may also lead one to think of that social organization as in some way ‘natural’, or at least, disincline one to question it. Speakers of a language that insists on feminine and masculine personal forms may be more accepting of gender roles in society than speakers of a language which does not. Wierzbicka notes that attempts by Polish communist governments to discourage use of the gendered address forms pan/pani (‘sir/madam’) in favour of the second person plural wy foundered because the genderless form sounded cold and impolite:

To the Polish ear, it sounded cold, impersonal and discourteous. (…) I presume that the ‘personal’ character of pan/pani is due partly to its singular form, and possibly also to its sex differentiation, whereas the ‘impersonal’ character of the form wy is due partly to its plural and genderless form. Polish courtesy stresses respect for every individual as an individual, and is highly sex-conscious.(Wierzbicka 2003: 58)

Spotlight: Sapir-Whorf and ‘verbal hygiene’

The weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is an important driver of debates over verbal hygiene, or what some call ‘politically correct language’. Consider the following advertisement for a job at a fictional university:

Lecturer in Linguistics – University of HistownThe University of Histown Department of Linguistics seeks a full-time Lecturer in Linguistics. The successful candidate will take up his duties at the start of the next academic year, and he will be expected to take a full part in the teaching, administration and research activities of the department. His remuneration will be determined on the basis of his responsibilites and experience.

The pronouns and possessive adjectives (he, his) are all masculine forms, which have traditionally been used in a gender-neutral way in formal English (e.g. everyone took his place) and do not therefore imply that only male candidates will be considered. Nonetheless, the consistent use of masculine forms subtly suggests that Histown University is something of a ‘boys’ club’ in which women are not welcome, and this might well deter able female candidates from applying for the post. Furthermore, as has often been pointed out, some supposedly ‘gender-neutral’ forms are in fact nothing of the kind: ‘Some men are female’ sounds odd, while ‘Some human beings are female’ does not; ‘Each applicant is to list the name of his spouse’ is similarly strange and sounds better with ‘his or her’.

For this reason, job advertisements like the one above are largely a thing of the past. Employers are required to use gender-inclusive language wherever possible, and terms like fireman, barman and stewardess are generally being replaced by firefighter, bartender and flight attendant (though not everyone accepts postie for postman); many actresses now prefer the gender-neutral actor.

Many European languages have what is known as a T/V distinction in which the second person singular form (e.g. tu in French, du in Swedish) is used with familiars and intimates while its plural equivalent (vous French; ni Swedish), when used with a single addressee, is more formal. The social values which the T/V distinction encodes vary considerably, however: using tu to a stranger in France would be perceived as rude, while the use of ni to one person in Swedish would generally appear odd or old-fashioned. These values are, moreover, subject to change: a famous paper by Brown and Gilman showed how the use of tu and vous in French had shifted considerably in the post-war years, with vous increasingly marking social distance rather than social superiority. Non-reciprocal T/V usage (a boss might once have demanded vous from staff while giving tu) was increasingly avoided in favour of reciprocal T or V use. A society aspiring to greater egalitarianism had begun to signal this by using its linguistic signs differently: the language had not prevented its members from conceiving an alternative social structure. The categories of our language may incline us to perceive the world in a certain way, but they do not make us do so and we can choose to see things differently. We need to be vigilant, in other words, in identifying the ‘conceptual fetters’.

Key idea: Language and world view

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds that our view of the world is dictated by the categories of our mother tongue. Few linguists today would accept it in its strong form, but a weaker version of the hypothesis has influenced the drive for non-discriminatory language.

Fact-check

1. [1](answers.mdx#rfn3-1)  What do paradigmatic relations involve?

1. The combinatorial possibilities of language elements

1. Substitutability between forms of the same category

1. Verb conjugation tables

1. The declension of adjectives

1. [2](answers.mdx#rfn3-2)  What does arbitariness apply to?

1. Signifiers

1. Signifieds

1. Both

1. Neither

1. [3](answers.mdx#rfn3-3)  What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?

1. That all languages have a common structure

1. That all languages are fundamentally different

1. That language must be reformed to eliminate sexist or racist concepts

1. That humans can only conceptualize the world in terms of their native language

1. [4](answers.mdx#rfn3-4)  In Saussure’s terminology, what does langue denote?

1. The language system

1. Speech

1. French

1. An individual’s mother tongue

1. [5](answers.mdx#rfn3-5)  The North American Descriptivists saw which level of linguistic analysis as least susceptible to scientific analysis?

1. Morphology

1. Phonetics

1. Syntax

1. Semantics

1. [6](answers.mdx#rfn3-6)  What are meaningful contrasts in language known as?

1. Phonemes

1. Oppositions

1. Syntagms

1. Signifiers

1. [7](answers.mdx#rfn3-7)  What is diachronic analysis concerned with?

1. Language change

1. The description of a language at one point in time

1. The interaction between linguistic levels, e.g. morphology and syntax

1. The comparison of two structurally similar languages

1. [8](answers.mdx#rfn3-8)  What are onomatopoeic words?

1. Entirely arbitrary

1. Partial exceptions to the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign

1. Naming words for animals

1. Language-specific and entirely arbitrary in form

1. [9](answers.mdx#rfn3-9)  Where does Saussure’s chessboard analogy break down?

1. Language change is not teleological

1. The state of a chess game is constantly changing

1. Speakers do not change language

1. Chess players remember past moves, but speakers don’t generally know about previous states of their language

1. [10](answers.mdx#rfn3-10)  Which of these claims is not associated with Saussure?

1. In language, there are no positive terms

1. We dissect nature along the lines of our native language

1. Both signifier and signified are arbitrary

1. Diachronic and synchronic data should be treated separately.

Dig deeper

J. Culler, Saussure (Fontana, 1976 or Cornell University Press, 1986), Chapters 1–3

R. Hudson, Sociolinguistics (2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, 1996), Chapter 3

T. Moore & C. Carling, Understanding Language: Towards a Post-Chomskyan Linguistics (Macmillan, 1982), Chapter 1

R. Robins, A Short History of Linguistics (Longman, 1997), Chapters 8 & 9

G. Sampson, Schools of Linguistics (Hutchinson, 1980), Chapters 2–4

Online sources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic\_relativity

On the cross-linguistic onomatopoeia of dog barking, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-linguistic\_onomatopoeias# Dog\_barking