Structural Linguistics - Criticism

Criticism

Linguist Noam Chomsky maintained that structural linguistics was efficient for phonology and morphology, because both have a finite number of units that the linguist can collect. However, he did not believe structural linguistics was sufficient for syntax, reasoning that an infinite number of sentences could be uttered, rendering a complete collection impossible. Instead, he proposed the job of the linguist was to create a small set of rules that could generate all the sentences of a language, and nothing but those sentences. Chomsky's critiques led him to found generative grammar.

One of Chomsky's key objections to structural linguistics was its inadequacy in explaining complex and/or ambiguous sentences. As Searle writes:

..."John is easy to please" and "John is eager to please" look as if they had exactly the same grammatical structure. Each is a sequence of noun-copula-adjective-infinitive verb. But in spite of this surface similarity the grammar of the two is quite different. In the first sentence, though it is not apparent from the surface word order, "John" functions as the direct object of the verb to please; the sentence means: it is easy for someone to please John. Whereas in the second "John" functions as the subject of the verb to please; the sentence means: John is eager that he please someone. That this is a difference in the syntax of the sentences comes out clearly in the fact that English allows us to form the noun phrase "John's eagerness to please" out of the second, but not "John's easiness to please" out of the first. There is no easy or natural way to account for these facts within structuralist assumptions.

By the latter half of the 20th century, many of Saussure's ideas were under heavy criticism. In 1972, Chomsky described structural linguistics as an "impoverished and thoroughly inadequate conception of language," while in 1984, Marcus Mitchell declared that structural linguistics was "fundamentally inadequate to process the full range of natural language held by no current researchers, to my knowledge." Holland writes that it was widely accepted that Chomsky had "decisively refuted Saussure. Much of Chomsky's work is not accepted by other linguists I am not claiming that Chomsky is right, only that Chomsky has proven that Saussure is wrong. Linguists who reject Chomsky claim to be going beyond Chomsky, or they cling to phrase-structure grammars. They are not turning back to Saussure."

In the 1950s as structural linguistics was fading in importance in linguistics, Saussure's ideas were appropriated by several prominent figures in continental philosophy, and from there were borrowed in literary theory, where they are used to interpret novels and other texts. However, several critics have charged that Saussure's ideas have been misunderstood or deliberately distorted by continental philosophers and literary theorists and are certainly not directly applicable to the textual level, which Saussure himself would have firmly placed within parole and so not amenable to his theoretical constructs. For example, Searle maintains that, in developing his deconstruction method, Jacques Derrida altered one of Saussure's key concepts: "The correct claim that the elements of the language only function as elements because of the differences they have from one another is converted into the false claim that the elements are "constituted on" (Derrida) the traces of these other elements."