| 释义 |
structural, a.|ˈstrʌktjʊərəl|
[f. structure n. + -al1.]
Of or pertaining to structure.
1. a. Of or pertaining to the art or practice of building. Chiefly in structural iron, structural steel, iron or steel intended for building construction.
1867Burton Hist. Scot. ii. (1873) I. 53 The rise of structural skill in Scotland. 1895Current Hist. V. 608 The great demand was for structural iron and steel. 1902Westm. Gaz. 21 May 8/2 Structural steel.
b. fig. Pertaining to the art of literary construction. rare.
1870Lowell Study Wind. (1871) 188 Chaucer..had a structural faculty which distinguishes him from all other English poets, his contemporaries.
2. Of or pertaining to the structure of a building as distinguished from its decoration or fittings. structural load (see quot. 1888). structural engineering, the branch of civil engineering concerned with large modern buildings and other structures; so structural engineer.
1877J. D. Chambers Div. Worship 1 Structural and other requisites for Divine Worship. a1878Scott Lect. Archit. (1879) I. 69 It was my endeavour to illustrate the mechanical and structural portion of the process. 1879Cassell's Techn. Educ. I. 183 The general rule, however, is that carpenters' work is structural, and connected with the carcase, whilst that of a joiner comprehends the finishings of the outside and inside of a building. 1886Conder Syrian Stone-Lore ii. (1896) 103 By careful examination I found that the arches near the great reservoir were not structural but false. 1888Lockwood's Dict. Mech. Engin., Structural Load, the load due to a structure itself, as distinguished from the imposed load. 1896Engineering Index 1892–5 II. 412 Structural engineering. Courses in —. See Engineering Education. 1912T. D. Atkinson Cathedrals 180 The great structural supports..Wykeham retained. 1912Register of Former Students (Mass. Inst. Technol.) 65 Burleigh, Cha(rle)s R(andall)..structural engineer and chief draughtsman. 1924Times Trade & Engin. Suppl. 29 Nov. 248/2 Structural engineers are irregularly employed. Ibid., Some of the finest structural engineering in the world was done in the Black Country. 1943A. Rand Fountainhead i. i. 15 Of course, no one denies the importance of structural engineering to a future architect. 1977Modern Railways Dec. 488/1 The APT project placed a complex set of inter-related demands on the structural engineer.
fig.1904S. H. Butcher Harvard Lect. 200 The subject-matter of poetry is the universal—that which is abiding and structural in humanity.
3. Of or pertaining to the arrangement and mutual relation of the parts of any complex unity.
1870Yeats Nat. Hist. Comm. 7 All raw substances contain within them structural evidences of the conditions under which they were developed. 1873Hamerton Intell. Life iii. x. 129 We learn several languages by perceiving their structural relations, and remembering these. 1874W. Spottiswoode Polarisation of Light vi. 76 The mechanical strain has imparted to portions of the glass a structural character analogous..to that of a crystal. 1874Hartwig's Aerial World ii. 24 Having obtained a knowledge of the various gaseous substances which compose the atmosphere, we will now cast a glimpse on their structural arrangement. 1884tr. Lotze's Logic Introd. 7 If, again, a tool is to fit the hand, it must have such other structural properties as make it easy to grasp. 1887Athenæum 8 Oct. 463/1 Singleton here..passes at once from the attitude of the eye-witness to the attitude of the chronicler, and tells the story..by the historical method. Nor was there any structural need for him to do this; he could have [etc.].
4. In various scientific uses.
a. Phys. and Path. Of or pertaining to the organic structure of an animal or plant, or a portion of an animal or vegetable body.
1845Budd Dis. Liver 202 No structural lesion of the brain. 1862Spencer First Princ. ii. xiii. §104. (1875) 302 The structural modifiability of an adult man is greater than that of an old man. 1863Huxley Man's Place in Nat. ii. 103 The structural differences which separate Man from the Gorilla and the Chimpanzee. 1877J. A. Allen Amer. Bison 488 In the structural character of the teeth themselves there is nothing that positively settles the question of their identity. 1880Bastian Brain i. 21 The localization of the path of the stimulus leads to structural results of another kind. 1898Syd. Soc. Lex., Structural disease, one involving tissue and causing change visible to the naked eye or the microscope; also organic disease in contradistinction to functional disease.
Comb.1901Amer. Jrnl. Psychol. XII. 598 The structural-functional psychology question.
b. Geol. Pertaining to the structure of the earth's crust, of a rock, formation, mountain, or the like.
1855Orr's Circ. Sci., Inorg. Nat. 57 The phenomena just described are called structural, as affecting the intimate structure of the mass, and not merely its external form. 1862Dana Man. Geol. iv. vi. 735 There are three elements at the base of the earth's features. First a geographical one..; the second, structural,—the system of cleavage-structure; the third dynamical. 1893B. Willis in 13th Ann. Rep. U.S. Geol. Surv. ii. 224 In the Appalachian province there are four districts, each of which is distinguished from the others by a prevailing structural type.
c. Of a branch of a science: Concerned with the study of the structures of natural products.
structural botany: botany dealing with the structure and organization of plants. structural chemistry: chemistry treating of the arrangement or order of attachment of atoms in the molecules of compounds. structural geology: geology dealing with the method of the formation of the rocks that constitute the earth's crust; also called geotectonic geology.
1835Lindley (title), A Key to structural, physiological, and systematic Botany. 1849Balfour Man. Bot. 1 Structural Botany, or Organography, which has reference to the textures of which plants are composed, and to the forms of the various organs. 1882Geikie Text-bk. Geol. iv. 474 Geotectonic (Structural) Geology, or the architecture of the earth's crust. 1907Nature 24 Oct. 654/1 Structural chemistry, moreover, is slowly acquiring the mastery over cholesterin by making use of the experience afforded by the synthetic study of the hydroaromatic substances.
d. Chem. Of or pertaining to the arrangement of atoms in a molecule; structural formula, a plane schematic method of representing the structure of a molecule by using punctuation (as CH3·CH:CH2) or lines (as CH3—CH = CH2) to indicate the position and nature of the bonds between constituent atoms; structural isomerism, a form of isomerism in which molecules having the same constituent atoms may have different structures, the atoms being joined in different sequences; so structural isomer.
1872Phil. Mag. XLIII. 241 (heading) On the relations between the atomic hypothesis and the condensed symbolic expressions of chemical facts and changes known as dissected (structural) formulæ. 1876Ibid. II. 162 To so-called normal butylic alcohol is generally assigned the structural formula CH2(C3H7)OH. 1926J. Read Textbk. Org. Chem. xii. 215 The various kinds of isomerism encountered up to the present point are all included under the general title of structural isomerism. Structural isomers are substances possessing the same molecular formula but different structural formulæ. 1951I. L. Finar Org. Chem. I. i. 6 It is always desirable to show the arrangement (if known) of the atoms in the molecule, and this is done by means of structural formulæ or bonddiagrams. 1980C. W. Spangler Org. Chem. i. i. 17 Such branching produces structural isomers, compounds having identical molecular formulas, but whose carbon backbones are arranged differently in three-dimensional space. Ibid. 18 If another atom (or group) is bonded to the carbon system (say, chlorine), positional isomerism as well as structural isomerism becomes possible. Ibid. 19 There are many different methods of writing structural formulas for organic molecules.
e. Biol. Of a gene: that specifies the aminoacid sequence of a polypeptide.
1959Pardee, Jacob, & Monod in Jrnl. Molecular Biol. I. 177 The situation revealed with the present system, namely a genetic ‘complex’ comprising, besides the ‘structural’ genes (z, y) a repressor-making gene (i) whose function is to block or regulate the expression of the neighbouring genes is, so far, unique for enzyme systems. 1966E. A. Carlson Gene xxiv. 229 The repressor was assumed to be incomplete. Thus the structural genes would be transcribed and their enzymes would synthesize a metabolite. 1976F. J. Ayala Molecular Evolution ii. 12 Substitutions in the DNA nucleotide sequence of a structural gene may result in changes in the amino acid sequence of the polypeptide encoded by the gene, although this is not always the case because of the degeneracy of the genetic code.
5. In the Social Sciences, Psychology, and other disciplines, such as Linguistics, connected with the analysis of social, mental, or linguistic organization.
a. Of, pertaining to, involving, or resulting from those aspects of a system concerned with the formal laws and relations of its structure, as distinguished from function or phenomenon; also, relating to or connected with the ‘deep’ structures that are considered to generate ‘surface’ structures. Cf. deep structure s.v. deep a. IV. c; functional a. 2 c.
1884W. James in Mind IX. 19 The contrast is really between two aspects, in which all mental facts without exception may be taken; their structural aspect, as being subjective, and their functional aspect, as being cognitions. 1890O. T. Mason in Ann. Rep. Smithsonian Inst. (1891) 527 A complete syllabus of anthropology would include—first, what man is, and second, what man does. What man is may be denominated structural anthropology; what man does, functional anthropology. 1908Philos. Rev. XVII. 651 The book is a very pronounced example of the structural type of psychology. 1917Internat. Jrnl. Amer. Linguistics I. 177 The existence of phonetic shifts, and the presence of structural similarities are too numerous. 1932M. Fortes tr. Petermann's Gestalt Theory ii. 33 The concept leads to a theory of reactions..which is characterized by Köhler's key-word ‘structural reaction’. 1940C. C. Fries in Language XVI. 199 (heading) On the development of the structural use of word-order in modern English. 1944Social Res. XI. 99 A Beethoven symphony where from a part of the whole we could grasp something of the inner structure of the whole itself. The fundamental laws, then, would not be piecemeal laws but structural characteristics of the whole. 1952C. C. Fries Structure of English iv. 58 One of the basic assumptions of our approach here to the grammatical analysis of sentences is that all the structural signals in English are strictly formal matters that can be described in physical terms of forms, correlations of these forms, and arrangements of order. 1952A. R. Radcliffe-Brown Structure & Function in Primitive Society 11 When we are dealing with a structural system we are concerned with a system of social positions. 1958Eng. Jrnl. XLVII. 479 Structural ambiguity, on the other hand, results from the arrangement of the words, that is, from the structure of the utterance. It is sometimes known as syntactic ambiguity and, in older logic books, as amphiboly. 1962R. Jakobson Sel. Writings I. 654 An analysis of the structural laws which underlie language and its evolution necessarily leads us to ascertain a limited set of actually given structural types. 1963Jacobson & Schoepf tr. Lévi-Strauss's Structural Anthropology p. viii, Two papers..are published here for the first time in conjunction with fifteen others that seem to me to elucidate the structural method in anthropology. 1964H. Hartmann Ego Psychol. xiv. 289 The genetic viewpoint had to be supplemented by a structural approach, though Freud never quite explicitly stated this. 1974Howard Jrnl. XIV. 37 Worsening structural inequalities... (We shall use the term ‘structural’ to refer to housing, education, employment, income and race.) 1974I. Rossi Unconscious in Culture 70 The same structural code is at work in mind, society, and physical reality. 1975G. Steiner After Babel ii. 77 Hamann's opening statement..and his..dictum that theories of language and of economics will prove mutually explanatory..set out in nuce much of Lé vi-Strauss's structural anthropology. 1976G. S. Klein Psychoanal. Theory 10 Basic tendencies that are often implied in the ‘structural point of view’ of contemporary psychoanalysis.
b. Special collocations: structural analysis, analysis of a system in terms of its general characteristics or structure; hence structural analyst; structural change (see quot. 1972); structural description = structural analysis above; structural-functional adj., that takes account of both structure and function; so structural-functionalism, structural-functionalist adj. and n.; structural grammar (see quot. 1975); structural integration, a technique of deep massage developed by Ida P. Rolf (see Rolf); structural linguistics, the study of a language viewed as a system made up of interrelated elements without regard to their historical development (cf. descriptive linguistics s.v. descriptive a. 3 b); hence structural linguist; structural linguistic adj.; structural psychology, an approach to the study of consciousness which relies on the introspective analysis of simple experience into elements; structural semantics, the study of the sense relations that may be established between words or groups of words; hence structural semanticist; structural-semantic adj.; structural unemployment, unemployment resulting from reorganization in the structure of industry due to technological change, etc., rather than from fluctuations in supply and demand; structural word = empty word s.v. empty a. and n. C (cf. grammatical word s.v. grammatical a. 2; structure word s.v. structure n. 8).
1898E. B. Titchener in Philos. Rev. VII. 465, I believe..that the best hope for psychology lies today in a continuance of structural analysis. 1901H. Oertel Lectures on Study of Lang. i. 45 We are here concerned with the method only of Humboldt's structural analysis. 1940Language XVI. 216 This is the neglect of the method of structural analysis, i.e. of organized synchronic description. 1974tr. Wertheim's Evol. & Revol. i. 91 Weber's views are more than once mentioned as having paved the way for structural analysis. 1979F. Kermode Genesis of Secrecy iv. 80 When the structural analysts have done their work, interpretation may take over.
1964Structural change [see SC s.v. S 4 a]. 1972R. A. Palmatier Gloss. Eng. Transformational Gram. 168 Structural change.., the generalization of the operation which a particular transformation performs..; the righthand side of a transformational rule.
1964Structural description [see SD s.v. S 4 a]. 1977Language LIII. 15 The ö of hösli was not affected because, after all, phonetically it didn't meet the structural description of Lowering.
1947T. Parsons in Parsons & Henderson tr. Weber's Theory Social & Econ. Organization 20 A second type [of conceptual scheme]..may be called a generalized structural-functional system. 1977J. D. Douglas in Douglas & Johnson Existential Sociol. i. 6 The classical structural-functional paradigm of social theory grew out of and progressively diverged from this mechanistic model.
1958Listener 28 Aug. 308/1 The first great proponent of structural-functionalism, Radcliffe Brown, failed to get beyond metaphor and analogy when he sought to explain his method. 1977Scott. Jrnl. Sociol. I. 186 A sense that differs both from American structural-functionalism, in which structure is merely descriptive, and from French structuralism, in which it is ‘reductive’.
1976E. Leach Culture & Communication i. 3 Others..offer structural-functionalist explanations. 1977Dædalus Summer 64 Like many structural-functionalists, he regards as unproblematical the processes by which corporations and other ‘surface structures’ come into existence.
1949W. O. Birk (title) Structural grammar for building sentences. 1975Language for Life (Dept. Educ. & Sci.) 594 Structural grammar, a grammar intended to explain the working of language in terms of the functions of its components and their relationships to each other without reference to meaning.
1963Systematics I. 66 (heading) Structural integration. 1975Sat. Rev. (U.S.) 22 Feb. 15/3 The body reformation methods called structural integration (commonly known as rolfing, after its developer Ida Rolf).
1949Archivum Linguisticum I. i. 89 The functional interpretations of language given by structural linguists are justified. 1951Language XXVII. 8 We must remember the particular attention which structural linguists in the United States have bestowed upon non-culture languages. 1958New Statesman 6 Sept. 288/3 The new advance guard, the Structural Linguists, round on the New Critics as amiable old pipe-smoking fuddy-duddies.
1954U. Weinreich in Word X. 389 Structural linguistic theory now needs procedures for constructing systems of a higher level out of the discrete and homogeneous systems that are derived from description. 1962New Yorker 10 Mar. 158/2 For the scientific study of language the Structural Linguistic approach is superior to that of the old grammarians.
1940Amer. Speech XV. 438/2 Harris, Zellig S. Rev. of L. H. Gray, Foundations of Language... Some useful remarks on ‘structural’ linguistics. 1941A. W. de Groot in Archives Néerlandaises de Phonétique Expérimentale XVII. 71 (title) Structural linguistics and phonetic law. 1945Word I. 58 With structural linguistics as the chief interest of some workers, area may be expected to play a more central role,—to be, in effect, a specialized point of departure. 1948Lingua I. i. 23 ‘Structural linguistics’ is a method, it is not a science and ‘structuralism’ is nothing but a collective name for general linguistic and explanatory grammatical examination of certain phenomena. 1959J. C. Catford in Quirk & Smith Teaching of English vi. 168 Professor Quirk..is talking about the approach to the scientific study of language which is known as ‘structural linguistics’. 1972D. Lodge 20th Cent. Lit. Crit. 545 Structural linguistics goes beyond the description of any particular language to pursue the ‘deep structures’ that are common to all languages.
1898E. B. Titchener in Philos. Rev. VII. 449 (title) The postulates of a structural psychology. 1933J. C. Flugel Hundred Yrs. Psychol. iv. ii. 229 (heading) ‘Structural’ and ‘functional’ psychology. 1980J. M. Carroll (title) Toward a structural psychology of cinema.
1973Archivum Linguisticum IV. 67 The structural-semantic category system of Soskin and John (1963).
1977J. Lyons Semantics I. iv. 102 One of the points that Saussure and other structural semanticists have insisted upon is that each language has, not only its own stock of forms, but also its own system of meanings or concepts.
1962D. H. Hymes in J. A. Fishman Readings Sociol. of Lang. (1968) 103 An ethnographic semantics..should be a structural analysis, achieving the economies of the rules of a grammar in relation to a series of analyses of texts. In the past generation Jakobson and his associates have done most to develop such a structural semantics. 1977J. Lyons Semantics ix. 270 From its very beginnings structural semantics..has emphasized the importance of relations of paradigmatic opposition.
1932A. H. Hansen Econ. Stabilization ix. 148 By structural unemployment..we mean unemployment caused by changes in the structure of industry that are of a nonrecurring type. 1966Economist 29 Jan. 407/2 The boom of the past years has brought jobs for Negroes and for the unskilled, in the teeth of cries that ‘automation’ and ‘structural unemployment’ meant that such people had no hope of finding work. 1979Guardian 31 May 735/3 The spectre of ‘structural unemployment’—the likelihood that some of today's young people will never have a job.
1940Bryant & Aiken Psychol. Eng. iv. 38 A distinction is made between ‘full’ and ‘empty’ words, the latter being what are known as ‘structural’ words. 1966J. Derrick Teaching Eng. to Immigrants i. 8 If we take our first example again, ‘The man is hitting the horse’ we find we can substitute any one of a hundred or more different items for the words man, hit and horse ... But if we try to do the same thing at one of the other places in the sentence, we find we can only substitute a limited set of words... The words in these places, where the choice is limited, are what writers have called the structural or grammatical words of the language, while the other words have been called content words or lexical items.
c. = structuralist 2.
1953College Composition & Communication IV. iv. 124 The structural objection to the traditional use of language is that the account of the mechanisms becomes distorted beyond reason. 1959Word XV. 176 The newly established chair of General Linguistics and Phonetics (which was, incidentally, the first structural academic position to be established anywhere).
Hence ˌstructuˈrality rare—0, structural quality or character.
1895in Funk's Stand. Dict. 1909Century Dict. Suppl.
Add:[5.] [b.] structural ambiguity (Linguistics), (an) ambiguity arising from uncertainty about the grammatical relationships of elements in a sentence (e.g. ‘Tell me what you are doing on Monday’); contr. with lexical ambiguity s.v. *lexical a. 1.
1952C. C. Fries Struct. of Eng. iv. 62 Some type of *structural ambiguity always results in English whenever the form-classes of the words are not clearly marked. 1984High Technol. Feb. 60/2 Syntactic analysis can successfully interpret the meaning of some sentences, but many sentences contain structural ambiguities. |
