structural(ist) linguistics n
an approach to linguistics which stresses the importance of language as a
system and which investigates the place that linguistic units such as sounds,
words, sentences have within this system.
Structural linguists, for example, studied the distribution of sounds within
the words of a language; that is, whether certain sounds appear only at the
beginning of words or also in the middle or at the end. They defined some
sounds in a language as distinctive and used in the identification of words
(see phoneme), and some as variants (see allophone). Similar studies
of distribution and classification were carried out in morphologyand
syntax.
In its widest sense, the term has been used for various groups of linguists,
including those of the Prague School, but most often it is used to refer to a
group of American linguists such as Bloomfield and Fries, who published
mainly in the 1930s to 1950s. The work of these linguists was based on
the theory of behaviourismand had a considerable influence on some
language teaching methods (see audiolingual method).
structural syllabus n
asyllabusfor the teaching of a language which is based on a selection
of the grammatical items and structures (e.g. tenses, grammatical rules,
sentence patterns) which occur in a language and the arrangement of them
into an order suitable for teaching. The order of introducing grammatical
items and structures in a structural syllabus may be based on such factors
as frequency, difficulty, usefulness, or a combination of these. While most
language teaching methods up to the 1970s were based on structural
syllabuses, since then a number of alternative syllabus types have been
adopted.
see also syllabus
structural word n
see content word
structure n
(in linguistics) the term often refers to a sequence of linguistic units that are
in a certain relationship to one another.
For example, one of the structures of a noun phrase^1 may be “article +
adjective +noun” as in the friendly ape. One of the possible syllable
structures in English is CVC (consonant +vowel +consonant) as in concert.
see also syntagmatic relations
structure dependency n
see universal grammar
structure dependency