3.Structural Linguistics. European and American Structuralism

Structural linguistics is an approach to linguistics originating from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. De Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a static system of interconnected units. He is thus known as a father of modern linguistics for bringing about the shift from diachronic to synchronic analysis.

Structural linguistics as developed especially in continental Europe. Baudouin de Courtenay was an important pioneer, followed in the early 20th century by Saussure. In the 1920s and 1930s their ideas were developed especially by members of the Prague School, notably Trubetzkoy and Jakobson; from the late 1930s by Hjelmslev and Martinet among others; also, though his basic assumptions were in part different, by Firth. Among later scholars, Coseriu and, from the 1960s, Lyons are among those whose ideas, despite many differences, stand clearly in the structuralist tradition. ‘Structuralism’ in literary studies developed especially in France in the 1960s, inspired largely by readings or misreadings of Saussure.

The German-born American anthropologist Edward Sapir (1884–1939) was responsible for many enduring concepts in linguistic research. Author of the landmark volume Language (1921), Sapir emphasizes that language is tightly linked to culture. For Sapir, language is an acquired function of culture rather than being biologically determined. This view is diametrically opposed to that of the transformationalists (see below), who believe (but have not proved) that human beings possess a genetically determined predisposition for language—including many of its most specific and distinguishing features—that is already present at the moment of birth. Sapir is undoubtedly correct when he points out that, sans society, an individual will never learn to talk in meaningful terms—that is, to communicate ideas to other persons within a given community. This can easily be demonstrated by observation of feral or mentally abused children and in children suffering from autism or other psychological disorders that affect the acquisition and manipulation of language.

4.Structural Linguistics. Anthropological linguistics

Structural linguistics is an approach to linguistics originating from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. De Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a static system of interconnected units. He is thus known as a father of modern linguistics for bringing about the shift from diachronic to synchronic analysis.

Anthropological linguistics is the study of the relations between language and culture and the relations between human biology, cognition and language. This strongly overlaps the field of linguistic anthropology, which is the branch of anthropology that studies humans through the languages that they use.

Conventional linguistic anthropology also has implications for sociology and self-organization of peoples. Study of the Penan people, for instance, reveals that their language employs six different and distinct words, all of whose best English translation is "we". Anthropological linguistics studies these distinctions, and relates them to types of societies and to actual bodily adaptation to the senses, much as it studies distinctions made in languages regarding the colours of the rainbow: seeing the tendency to increase the diversity of terms, as evidence that there are distinctions that bodies in this environment must make, leading to situated knowledge and perhaps a situated ethics, whose final evidence is the differentiated set of terms used to denote "we".