Ordering Language in Structural Linguistics

Abstract

This study examines how language is ordered within structural linguistics, considering the achievements made through the adoption of structuralism, and that transcend linguistics to encompass a variety of academic and epistemological fields. By distilling a comprehensive vision for the relationship between the components of a language, structuralism has provided modern linguistics with numerous methodological and theoretical tools that allow for a framework to view linguistic engineering through a prism of modern linguistics. In such a way, the paper addresses the various levels through which structural linguistics views a language. It also focuses on a number of specific topics, including: the nature and components of language, as viewed by structural linguistics; the levels of a language; the ordering and operation of a language; the nature of the relations that bind these together; the way in which the procedural, methodological and theoretical means through which structural approaches to understanding linguistics combine. The departure point for this study is the problematic of method, and the means by which modern linguistics has overcome this through its reliance on the natural sciences, and its absorption of the lessons of a number of various schools of thought.