Structuallism and its founder, Ferdinand de Saussure.

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Ferdinand de Saussure was born in Genebva in 1857. He spend his life studying linguistics and laid the foundation for a school of thought later named structualism. Saussure completed his education in Geneve, Leipzig, and Berlin obtaining his doctorate in 1800. He taught historical linguistics at Paris and became a professor of Indo-European linguistics at Geneva.

Why do the English transcribe a rooster's cros as "coco-a-doodle-doo," but the Spanish as "cocorico"? The sound ofa rooster crowing is exactly the same across the globe;the only difference is human interpretation. Saussure studied this phenomenon and other grammatical relationsihps that becmae known as structualism. This school of thought has three parts: 1)Units and rules 2)Linguistic value 3)Syntagmatic relations.

Structualism in its most elementary definition is defined in tow parts: Units, which are individual words, and rules, which are the grammatical prerequisites that humans use to combine siad units. Saussure also made a connection between concepts and sound image.

His example is the sound image(or spoken word)"tree" and the various words for tree in various languages. When a Spaniard says"arbre" the concept (or picture) that immediate comes to mimnd is the same as when Americans say "tree."

According to Saussure, thought cannot exist without language. For example, does a mute person have a thought process being that thye have never mastered language? This is part of how structualist term linguistic value. Linguistic value is defined as the collective meaning of units. When combined within the proper rules one can create a sentence. This value also states that words can be interchanged for things to which it is similar (synonyms) or dissimilar (ideas).

The final component of structualism is designated as syntagmatic relations, also known as word order. An example of this is seen when one examines the placemtn of words. Some cultures begin...