The parameters of what was to become "structuralism" were

demarcated by Fernand de Saussure long before the term

was applied to any movement. Saussure's notes, compiled and

published in 1915 by three of his students, made a programatic

call for the study of the observable (or rather, sensable)

features of language considered from the perspective of a

particular-language user rather than from a position detached and

outside language use. In this way, he felt able to separate the

study of language not only from speaking (_parole_), but also

from innumerable impinging factors that had put the study of

language off-course in his opinion. He thought a core of

linguistic theory could be profitably researched apart from the

borderlands between language and culture, psychology, history,

sociology, biology, and geography.

His methodology limited the scope of linguistics in two

ways. First, he dismissed all that was not salient to a user of

a particular language. For example, loanwords, considered of

great importance to comparative philologists and neogrammarians,

were negligible to Saussure. Although a speaker may use borrowed

French words in her English, she still spoke English, not French,

from her perspective. In this way, Saussure sought an approach

which would now be considered emic as opposed to etic

<[LINK]> approaches which were concerned with the

measurement and direction of language change. Second, he

discarded as interesting but intestable all that could not be

directly observed or empirically tested. While he found

profitable the study of how the semiotic apparatus of language

(signs) comprised a label (signifier) arbitrarily annealed to its

referent (signified), he dismissed for the moment the study of

what those signs meant and how meaning shifted over time within

them, semantics. The second method of his approach is the one

that associated him with the structuralists, who expanded upon

it. Led by Bloomfield in American linguistics, they sought to

measure, quantify and classify language in every way possible,

generally ignoring Saussure's first methodological constraint as

irrelevant to the objective and descriptive study of language.

The structuralists set up a implicational hierarchy of the

empirically testable aspects of language. The base was

phonetics. Speech sounds were measured by physical requirements

of production as well as acoustic properties. Morphology was

then based upon this categorization of sounds. A description of

irreducible units of meaning, morphology was the empirical

offspring of Saussure's semiotics. The structures or "units" of

meaning (rather than Saussure's "signs") were studied, not

meaning itself. The assumption was that the more thoroughly

phonetic work was done, the more accurate would be the resulting

morphological description. A description of syntax could then be

built upon the morphology by studying the structures and ordering

of rules of morphological components. As with Saussure, the

study of meaning itself in language was left as an ineffable, a

subject for philosophic contemplation rather than linguistic

description.

A problem with structuralism is that many of the most

interesting questions fall outside its purview. Often, critics

of the movement point this out from an unacknowledged but secure

position atop its descriptive contributions to linguistic

knowledge. Chomsky, incorporating the findings of structuralism

and recognizing its limits, returned to the questions that the

movement could not answer about the nature of language. His

position was a shift from the etic back to the emic, expressed by

his separation of _performance_, which was describable but had

reached the limits of what it could explain in the structuralist

paradigm, and _competence_, an explanatory theory of how language

is produced but which could only be approached through the study

of intuitions which were themselves not empirically observable.