Microsoft Word 05 descriptions doc

development of phonology would be the one great success story of structuralism. For 

example, in English we hear the sounds /b/ and /v/ as significantly different, since their 

difference helps us to distinguish “bat” from “vat.” In spoken Iberian Spanish, however, 

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there is generally no significant difference, to the extent that the spoken language will 

not help people spell words like “vota” or “bota.” This is because English has two 

separate phonemes for these sounds (quite apart from the many different ways of 

pronouncing those sounds), whereas Spanish only has one. People speaking the 

languages can certainly pronounce the different sounds, but the underlying structure of 

each language divides up the sounds in different ways. That underlying structure is 

acquired when we learn a language, even though we are not aware of it. For Prague 

synchronic linguistics, and for structuralism in general, the object of study should thus 

be the underlying structure (the phonemes), not the surface-level phenomena (the details 

of phonetics). This was basically the same insight as Saussure’s analysis of sheep and 

mouton, except that in phonemics the structures formed complete and relatively stable 

systems. If you change one term (especially a vowel in English), the other terms 

actually do tend to change. In that sense, phonemics moved the focus of ideal research 

from structures to strong systems.  

Once you understand this view of what a structure is, it is relatively easy to see a