Question

A structural linguist is more interested in the language people speak in a given speech community today than on general, historical patterns of speech.   True or  False

Answer 1

True

Well, this is not true, but the opposite is also not true.

Although in reality this question should not be in a true or false format as structural linguists study the structures of languages and tend to look at the development of the language throughout history, they will mainly focus on current day language since it is continuously developing and changing, therefore the answer would be true despite being incomplete

Answer 2

Well, this is not true, but the opposite is also not true.

Structural linguists look for structure in language, so they would look at how words are composed of phonemes and morphemes. They are mostly working on current languages, but that's because they have access to them easily. When they can, they also study how those patterns evolved historically. De Saussure, the founder of Structural Linguistics is for example and important figure in historical linguistics.