Exorcising the oral

The notion of text in structural linguistics

Abstract

Structural Linguistics as an intellectual movement has its origins in the practice of Linguistics during the fin de siècle. This movement finds its first major codification in the three courses conducted by Ferdinand de Saussure in the first decade of the 20th century. These lectures were the basis of the book Course in General Linguistics published posthumously in 1916.
One of the major orientations provided by this movement is the emphasis on the oral nature of the language. The project of Modern Linguistics in the 19th century was the comparison and reconstruction of languages from a historical perspective. Thus there was an exclusive reliance on written records. The shift in emphasis from the written to the oral was accompanied by the shift in emphasis from diachronic to synchronic perspective towards language.
Interestingly accompanying the emphasis on the oral was the move to sharply distinguish language (langue) from speech (parole) giving rise to the formulation which defines langue (as opposed to speech) as the proper object of study for the science of language which linguistics proposed to be. Thus we see a double movement in Structuralism, in that it brings the oral nature of language at the centre stage but at the same time keeps speech outside the ambit of its study.
This double movement can be most clearly seen in the notion of text in Structural Linguistics. 'Text' a notion primarily used in the context of the written serves as a central notion in the study of language now seen as primarily as spoken. The shift is from a written text to a spoken text. Thus the object of study for synchronic linguistics is the spoken text carved out of speech, which has already been deemed to be unfit for a scientific study. Here we observe that the data for linguistics, the spoken text, is a theoretical construct. What the linguist studies is the code underlying the given texts of a language.
The paper seeks to analyse this double movement which took place in structural linguistics and tries to locate the roots of this double movement in the various socio-economic crucible of the times when structuralism arose as an intellectual movement in the late 19th and early 20th century. For this purpose, the paper analyses the thought of F. de Saussure as well as linguists like R. Jacobson and N. Trubetzkoy.