Discussion

Beyond structuralism
Should we set a priori limits on our curiosity?

T. Givón
University of Oregon, Eugene, and and Ignacio, Colorado

Keywords: Structuralism, linguistics as a discipline

1. Introduction

In issue 36.2 of this journal, Gilbert Lazard (2012) tried to convince us that we
ought to limit the scope of our investigation of human language to something he
terms “pure linguistics”. I have kept searching for a real argument in his declara-
tion of faith but have found none. What I did find was a useful historical account
of F. de Saussure (1915) and like-minded structuralists. My own difficulty is not
with structuralism per se. All of us who have found good reasons to go beyond
Lazard’s “pure linguistics” acknowledge that to transcend description one had bet-
ter first learn to describe. Fundamentally, all decent functionalists, cognitivists,
historical grammarians, child-language scholars, typologists, anthropological lin-
guists, neuro-psycho-linguists, and evolutionary linguists are structuralists plus.
They begin by describing the phenomenology, then proceed to ask various why,
how, and how-come questions; such as, respectively:
– Are there systematic correlations between linguistic structures and their asso-
ciated cognitive and communicative functions? And if so, what are the general
principles, and processes, that shape and constrain such correlations?
– How do synchronic linguistic structures, with their systematic form-function
correlations, come into being, and what constrains their diachrony?
– How do we acquire our first or second language? Why this particular way
rather than any other? What socio-cultural, communicative, or neuro-psycho-
logical factors might constrain language acquisition?
– What constrains the scope of linguistic-typological diversity? How come con-
straints on diversity are the way they are? What are the mechanisms that gov-
ern such constraints?

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414 T. Givón

– What features of language are shaped by culture, and through what mecha-
nisms?
– What is the relationship between language structure and the mind/brain that
processes it?
– Given that human biology, socio-culture, and communication are the prod-
ucts of protracted evolution, how did human language evolve?
One could, of course, make assertions about the autonomy and encapsulation of
language structure, as both Leonard Bloomfield and Noam Chomsky have done.
But how could one reject the potential relevance — and constraining power — of
clearly-related neighboring domains without first investigating them? More to the
point perhaps: Is description without explanation a serious option in science?

2. Structuralism and the philosophy of science

Structuralism in linguistics is not rooted in linguistics itself, but rather in philoso-

phy, beginning with Aristotle’s celebrated opening paragraph to De Interpretatione:
(1) “Now spoken sounds [=words] are symbols of affections of the soul
[=thoughts], and written marks are symbols of spoken sounds. And just
as written marks are not the same for all men [=are language specific],
neither are spoken sounds. But what these are in the first place signs of —
affections of the soul — are the same for all [=are universal]; and what are
these affections are likenesses of — actual things — are also the same for all
men…” (Ackrill ed. 1963; bracketed material added.)

From Aristotle’s empiricist perspective, thoughts (‘affections of the soul’) re-

flect external reality (‘actual things’) faithfully and iconically (‘are likenesses of ’).
What is more, this reflecting relation is universal (‘the same for all men’). In con-
trast, linguistic expressions (‘words’) bear an arbitrary relation to (‘are symbols
of ’) thoughts, a relation that is not universal (‘not the same for all men’).
The arbitrariness — thus autonomy — posited by Aristotle applied only to
the phonological coding of lexical words. In his treatment of grammar in the
Categories and various works on logic (e.g. Posterior Analytic), an isomorphism
— functionally motivated relation — is postulated between grammatical catego-
ries and sentences, on the one hand, and logical meaning, on the other. In this,
Aristotle conformed to Plato’s Kratylos; and the thread of this functionalist iso-
morphism runs uninterrupted through the works of the Greek grammarians, the
medieval Modistae, and the Port Royal grammarians, all the way to the end of the
19th century (Itkonen 2010).
 Beyond structuralism 415

The rise of structuralism in the social sciences in the early 20th century, with
its two towering figures, F. de Saussure and L. Bloomfield, owes its intellectual roots
in part to Aristotle’s fatal paragraph (1), but in larger measure to a radical brand
of empiricism — Logical Positivism — that rose at the end of the 19th century.
To the infant disciplines of psychology, anthropology, and linguistics, two expo-
nents of Logical Positivism, Bertrand Russell (Russell 1956) and Rudolph Carnap
(Carnap 1963), offered the deceptive analogy of physics, a science to which no-
tions such as purpose, function, adaptive-selection or evolutions do not apply.
In tracing the roots of 20th century structuralism to the Positivist philosophy
of science, one must recall that the ultimate descent of Positivism in the philosophy
of science goes back to Aristotle’s objectivist epistemology. This is fairly transpar-
ent in Rudolph Carnap’s later reflection on the physicalism of the Vienna Circle:
(2) “The thesis of physicalism, as originally accepted in the Vienna Circle, says
roughly: Every concept of the language of science can be explicitly defined
in terms of observables; therefore every sentence of the language of science
is translatable into a sentence concerning observable properties.” (Carnap
1963: 59)

Bertrand Russell’s objectivism, couched in more forbidding terms, is evident

in his discussion of the relation between particular entities (description) and the
universal concept (theory) to which they give rise:
(3) “We may then define a particular in our fourth sense as an entity that cannot
be in or belong to more than one place at any particular time, and a universal
as an entity that either cannot be in or belong to any place, or can be in
or belong to many places at once… Owing to the admission of universals
in our fourth sense, we can make an absolute division between percepts
and concepts. The universal whiteness is a concept, whereas a particular
white patch is a percept… Such general qualities as whiteness never exist in
time, whereas the things that do exist in time are all particular [percepts].”
(Relations of universals and particulars; in Russell 1956: 122)

The core notion of functionalism, purpose or function, is an invisible teleo-

logical construct that defies translation into Carnap’s ‘language of science’; as are
central psychological concepts vital to language such as meaning, intent, message,
mind, knowledge, or belief. The critical element that makes something a biological
code, or in C.S. Peirce’s (1934, 1940) words, “something by knowing of which one
knows something more”, is the signal’s association with some purpose, function,
or intended message. This is where the world of living organisms stands in stark
contrast to the pre-biological universe of physics and chemistry — where teleo-
416 T. Givón

logical notions are senseless except perhaps in reference to the Divine. To quote
the physicist I. Rabi:
(4) “My view of physics is that you make discoveries but, in a certain sense, you
never really understand them. You learn how to manipulate them, but you
never really understand them. “Understanding” would mean relating them
to something else — to something more profound.” (Rabi 1975: 96)

Description without explanation is tantamount to facts without theory; for at

the very heart of science lie the theory-dependence of facts and the explanatory
imperative of theories. This is seen more clearly in post-Peircean pragmatic phi-
losophy of science, beginning with Kuhn’s observation that the investigative cycle
of science begins with a discrepancy between new facts and current theory:
(5) “Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, i.e. with the
recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced
expectations that govern normal science.” (Kuhn 1962: 52–53)

We owe to Hanson (1958) the mature formulation of the process science, in

his integration of Carnap’s inductivism, Popper’s (1934/1959) deductivism, and
Peirce’s (1934, 1940) abductive inference. Put together:1
(6) Abductive phase
a. Puzzling facts F are incompatible with current theory T.
b. Facts F are, however, totally compatible with new hypothesis H.
c. If hypothesis H were true, facts F would find their natural explanation
in it.
d. Therefore, by abduction, hypothesis H must be the case.
Deductive phase:
e. Derive a sufficient number of the logical implications LI of hypothesis H.
Inductive phase:
f. Construct experimental or corpus-statistic tests of logical implications
LI of H.
g. Gather the facts concerning those logical implications. Do the facts
uphold or falsify logical implications LI of H?
Deductive phase:
h. If you failed to falsify logical implications LI, hypothesis H survives —
till some future test would falsify some of its logical implications, or till
new facts are discovered that are incompatible with hypothesis H.

Two important points emerge from Hanson’s integrated description:

– Facts (descriptions) are not independent of theory, but rather are theoretical
constructs that interact with the theory;
 Beyond structuralism 417

– The process of hypothesis formation (abduction) is indispensable to science,

and is tantamount to theoretical explanation.
As one may recall, Aristotle’s doctrine of the arbitrariness of the linguistic
sign — and thus arbitrariness of cross-language diversity — pertained only to the
semiotic relation between concepts (words) and sounds or letters. But latter-day
structuralists unreflectively extended the doctrine to grammar. In the intellectual
climate fostered by Logical Positivism, Saussure (1915) elaborated the three reign-
ing dogmas of structuralism:
– arbitrariness: The detachment of the visible signal from its invisible mental —
purposive — correlates;
– idealization: The reification of the underlying abstract system — langue — as
against the manifest behavior — parole;2
– segregation: The detachment of synchrony (product) from diachrony (pro-
cess).
The dogma of arbitrariness sold us on the illusion that cross-language typolog-
ical variation is capricious and unconstrained. Idealization brought us Chomsky’s
(1965) competence and the rejection of natural data of language use, behavior, and
processing. Segregation made us ignore the central role diachrony plays in ex-
plaining synchrony. These are the three dogmas that Lazard (2012) is urging us to
re-adopt.
Like Saussure, Leonard Bloomfield, the father of American structuralism,
owed his conception of meaning to the Positivists — via Behaviorist psychology:3
(7) “We must study people’s habits of language — the way they talk — without
bothering about mental processes that we may conceive to underlie or
accompany habits. We must dodge the issue by a fundamental assumption,
leaving it to a separate investigation, in which our results will figure as data
along the results of other social sciences.” (Bloomfield 1922: 142)
(8) “In order to give a scientifically accurate definition of meaning for every
form of the language, one should have to have a scientifically accurate
knowledge of everything in the speaker’s world… In practice, we define
the meaning of a linguistic form, whenever we can, in terms of some other
science…” (Bloomfield 1933: 139–140)

In the same vein, Bloomfield’s rejection of universals and theory harkens back
to Aristotle’s and Saussure’s arbitrariness:
(9) “North of Mexico alone there are dozens of totally unrelated groups of
languages, presenting the most varied types of structures. In the stress of
recording utterly strange forms of speech, one soon learns that philosophical
418 T. Givón

presuppositions were only a hindrance… The only useful generalizations

about language are inductive generalizations.” (1933: 19–20).

I see no discernible reason for adopting Saussure’s and Bloomfield’s strictures.

Lack of scientific curiosity and disinterest in explanation are not, to my mind,
much of an argument.

3. Explanatory biology: Aristotle revisited4

It is not an accident that structuralists like Saussure, Bloomfield, and Chomsky

find their affinity to science in physics, the paradigm science of the Positivists. But
in fact, biology turns out to be a much better scientific analog for linguistics. First,
because the explanatory notions of function, adaptation, and selection have been
embedded in it ever since Aristotle’s De Partibus Animalium. And second, because
ever since Aristotle’s De Generationem Animalium, biology has been an unabash-
edly developmental discipline.
It is indeed a curious fluke of history that the father of structuralism in lin-
guistics turns out to have been the progenitor of functionalism in biology. Two
structuralist schools dominated Greek biological thought prior to Aristotle’s,
both seeking to understand living organisms as inorganic matter. Empedocles
proposed to explain organisms by their component elements (chemistry), while
Democritus opted for understanding organisms through their component parts
— their structure.
In De Partibus Animalium, Aristotle first argued against Empedocles’ elemen-
tal approach, pointing out the relevance of histological and anatomical macro-
structure:
(10) “But if men and animals are natural phenomena, then natural philosophers
must take into consideration not merely the ultimate substances of which
they are made, but also flesh, bone, blood and all the other homogeneous
parts; not only these but also the heterogenous parts, such as face, hand,
foot…” (McKeon ed. 1941: 647)

Aristotle next noted the inadequacy of Democritus’ structuralism:

(11) “Does, then, configuration and color constitute the essence of the various
animals and their several parts? … No hand of bronze or wood or stone
constituted in any but the appropriate way can possibly be a hand in more
than a name. For like a physician in a painting, or like a flute in a sculpture,
it will be unable to do the office [= function] which that name implies.”
(ibid.:647; italics and bracketed translations added).
 Beyond structuralism 419

Next, Aristotle offered his functionalist touchstone — the teleological inter-

pretation of living organisms, using the analogy of usable artifacts:
(12) “What, however, I would ask, are the forces by which the hand or the body
was fashioned into its shape? The woodcarver will perhaps say, by the axe
and auger; the physiologist, by air and earth. Of these two answers, the
artificer’s is the better, but it is nevertheless insufficient. For it is not enough
for him to say that by the stroke of his tool this part was formed into a
concavity, that into a flat surface; but he must state the reasons why he struck
his blow in such a way as to affect this, and what his final object [= purpose]
was…” (ibid.:647–648; italics added)

Finally, Aristotle outlined the governing principle of functionalism, the iso-

morphic mapping between form and function:
(13) “If a piece of wood is to be split with an axe, the axe must of necessity be
hard; and, if hard, it must of necessity be made of bronze or iron. Now
exactly in the same way the body, which like the axe is an instrument — for
both the body as a whole and its several parts individually have definite
operations for which they are made; just in the same way, I say, the body
if it is to do its work [= function], must of necessity be of such and such
character.” (ibid.:650; italics and brackets added)

Ever since Aristotle, structuralism — the idea that structure is autonomous,

arbitrary, and requires no ‘external’ explanation; or worse, that structure somehow
explains itself — has been a dead issue in biology, a discipline where common-
sense functionalism is taken for granted like mother’s milk. Thus, from a contem-
porary introductory anatomy text:
(14) “Anatomy is the science that deals with the structure of the body…
physiology is defined as the science of function. Anatomy and physiology
have more meaning when studied together.” (Crouch 1978: 9–10)

Pre-Darwinian biology amassed three separate descriptive databases:

– The Aristotle-initiated descriptive taxonomy (typology) of living beings,
scaled from the simplest to the most complex (scala naturae);
– The Aristotle-initiated understanding of anatomy-physiology (form-function)
correlations;
– The stratified fossil record of geology.
Darwin (1859) integrated these three descriptive databases into an explana-
tory theoretical framework — selectional-adaptive evolution. Two additional da-
tabases were integrated later on into the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution:
420 T. Givón

– Molecular genetics (Futuyma 1986);

– Developmental biology (West-Eberhard 2004).
The latter is particularly important because it suggests a connection, not only ana-
logical but also homological, to language diachrony, the culturally-transmitted de-
velopmental trend that, we used to think, had no precedent in biology.5
The source of variation in biological populations is both genetic (genotypic)
and non-genetic (phenotypic, epigenetic, behavioral). While both can be adap-
tive, it was earlier assumed that only genetic variation has direct evolutionary
consequences. However, the adaptive interaction of genes with the environment
— natural selection — is mediated by the phenotypic structural and behavioral
traits controlled by the genes. As a result, non-genetic variation does partake in
the actual mechanism of adaptive selection. Put another way, synchronic varia-
tion in behavior — the adaptive experimentation of individuals — contributes, in
a fashion reminiscent of Lamarck, to the eventual direction of adaptive evolution.
Or, as Ernst Mayr puts it:
(15) “Many if not most acquisitions of new structures in the course of evolution
can be ascribed to selection forces exerted by newly-acquired behaviors
(Mayr 1960). Behavior, thus, plays an important role as the pacemaker of
evolutionary change. Most adaptive radiations were apparently caused by
behavioral shifts.” (Mayr 1982: 612; emphases added)

In the same vein, Fernald and White (2000) observe:

“Behavior can and does influence specific aspects of brain structure and function
over three different time frames. A causal link is easy to establish on an evolution-
ary time scale because selective forces of the ecological niche of the animal typi-
cally are reflected in the body shape, sensory and motor systems, and behavior.
Similarly, on a developmental time scale, behavior acts in concert with the envi-
ronment to establish structural changes in the brain that influence an organism
throughout its lifetime. Surprisingly, there currently is evidence that in real time,
social behavior also causes changes in the brain in adult animals…” (Fernald and
White 2000: 1193; emphases added)

4. Closure

Ever since Aristotle, biology has been a prime example of how structural de-
scription and theoretical explanation go hand in hand and stimulate each other’s
growth. Till the advent of Logical Positivism in the late 19th century, linguists had
practiced a recognizable brand of Platonic-Aristotelian functionalism (Itkonen
2010). It would be a bloomin’ shame if linguists in the 21st century — for lack
 Beyond structuralism 421

of curiosity or disinterest in explanation — did not follow suit.6 Functionalism

in linguistics has always been, whether acknowledged or unacknowledged, an at-
tempt to understand language facts in an explanatory — theoretical — frame-
work. Towering antecedents like F. Bopp (1816), W. von Humboldt (1836), H. Paul
(1890), O. Jespersen (1921, 1924), E. Sapir (1921), G. Zipf (1935), and D. Bolinger
(1977), among many others, have made it clear that description and explanation
march in tandem. If we are ever to understand human language in its multiple,
complex connectivity, a retreat to Saussure’s and Bloomfield’s Positivism is not
likely to get us there.

Notes

1.  For further detail see Givón (2005, ch. 7).

2.  Saussure’s idealized langue harkens back to Plato’s eidon (‘essence’; see Bostock 1994;
Williams 1994).

3.  Bloomfield got his behaviorism from his Chicago colleague Weiss, thus indirectly from
Watson. He and his structuralist followers never adopted Saussure’s Platonic idealization, an
anathema to empiricists.

4.  For a more extensive discussion of the intellectual roots of functionalism in linguistics and
their connectivity to biology, see Givón (2012).

5.  For further discussion of the role of everyday adaptive behavior in language diachrony and
evolution, see Givón (2009).

6.  Lazard is not alone in his nostalgia for “pure linguistics”. A similar perspective has been ad-
vocated by Haspelmath (2007, 2010).

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Author’s Address:
T. Givón
P.O.Box 1694
Ignacio, CO 81137-1694
United States
tgivon@uoregon.edu
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