Traditionalism Versus Structuralism in Linguistics and Literary Studies

I. Traditionallinguistics Under traditional linguistics I understand a kind of linguistics that was the most common (roughly) between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century. Its representatives can basically be labelled as historical linguists (neogrammarians), philologists, traditional grammarians, dialectologists and phoneticians. Its most important characteristics (as I see them) were: (1) To be worthy of academic study linguistics,1 called 'language science' ('spdichwissenschaft' in German or 'sprakvetenskap' in Swedish) or philology, should be historical. This meant that changes over time were central. Even when a problem could be studied without history some reference to an earlier state was desirable. Although in some studies there was little or no reference to other stages of the language, the study was still respectable because it dealt with some older stage and not with present day language. Strangely enough various points in time were not always clearly distinguished. Interesting, perhaps curious, facts in the living language were 'explained' by saying what they had been at an older stage of the language: the present fact a is an 'old' b. However, no attempt was made to elucidate how a was related to other contemporary forms so that an insightful synchronic description could be achieved. For instance, the(e are a small number of words in Swedish with a puzzling -u. However, laymen as well as linguists thought the problem solved if one stated that it is an 'old genitive

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