Structural
linguistics in America.
American and European structuralism shared a number of features. In insisting upon the necessity of treating each language as a more or less coherent and integrated system, both European and American linguists of this period tended to emphasize, if not to exaggerate, the structural uniqueness of individual languages. There was especially good reason to take this point of view given the conditions in which American linguistics developed from the end of the 19th century. There were hundreds of indigenous American Indian languages that had never been previously described. Many of these were spoken by only a handful of speakers and, if they were not recorded before they became extinct, would be permanently inaccessible. Under these circumstances, such linguists as Franz Boas (died 1942) were less concerned with the construction of a general theory of the structure of human language than they were with prescribing sound methodological principles for the analysis of unfamiliar languages. They were also fearful that the description of these languages would be distorted by analyzing them in terms of categories derived from the analysis of the more familiar Indo-European languages.
After Boas, the two most influential American linguists were Edward Sapir (died 1939) and Leonard Bloomfield (died 1949). Like his teacher Boas, Sapir was equally at home in anthropology and linguistics, the alliance of which disciplines has endured to the present day in many American universities. Boas and Sapir were both attracted by the Humboldtian view of the relationship between language and thought, but it was left to one of Sapir's pupils, Benjamin Lee Whorf, to present it in a sufficiently challenging form to attract widespread scholarly attention. Since the republication of Whorf's more important papers in 1956, the thesis that language determines perception and thought has come to be known as the Whorfian hypothesis.
Sapir's work has always held an attraction for the more anthropologically inclined American linguists. But it was Bloomfield who prepared the way for the later phase of what is now thought of as the most distinctive manifestation of American "structuralism." When he published his first book in 1914, Bloomfield was strongly influenced by Wundt's psychology of language. In 1933, however, he published a drastically revised and expanded version with the new title Language; this book dominated the field for the next 30 years. In it Bloomfield explicitly adopted a behaviouristic approach to the study of language, eschewing in the name of scientific objectivity all reference to mental or conceptual categories. Of particular consequence was his adoption of the behaviouristic theory of semantics according to which meaning is simply the relationship between a stimulus and a verbal response. Because science was still a long way from being able to give a comprehensive account of most stimuli, no significant or interesting results could be expected from the study of meaning for some considerable time, and it was preferable, as far as possible, to avoid basing the grammatical analysis of a language on semantic considerations. Bloomfield's followers pushed even further the attempt to develop methods of linguistic analysis that were not based on meaning. One of the most characteristic features of "post-Bloomfieldian" American structuralism, then, was its almost complete neglect of semantics. (see also Index: stimulus-response theory)
Another characteristic feature, one that was to be much criticized by Chomsky, was its attempt to formulate a set of "discovery procedures"--procedures that could be applied more or less mechanically to texts and could be guaranteed to yield an appropriate phonological and grammatical description of the language of the texts. Structuralism, in this narrower sense of the term, is represented, with differences of emphasis or detail, in the major American textbooks published during the 1950s.
American and European structuralism shared a number of features. In insisting upon the necessity of treating each language as a more or less coherent and integrated system, both European and American linguists of this period tended to emphasize, if not to exaggerate, the structural uniqueness of individual languages. There was especially good reason to take this point of view given the conditions in which American linguistics developed from the end of the 19th century. There were hundreds of indigenous American Indian languages that had never been previously described. Many of these were spoken by only a handful of speakers and, if they were not recorded before they became extinct, would be permanently inaccessible. Under these circumstances, such linguists as Franz Boas (died 1942) were less concerned with the construction of a general theory of the structure of human language than they were with prescribing sound methodological principles for the analysis of unfamiliar languages. They were also fearful that the description of these languages would be distorted by analyzing them in terms of categories derived from the analysis of the more familiar Indo-European languages.
After Boas, the two most influential American linguists were Edward Sapir (died 1939) and Leonard Bloomfield (died 1949). Like his teacher Boas, Sapir was equally at home in anthropology and linguistics, the alliance of which disciplines has endured to the present day in many American universities. Boas and Sapir were both attracted by the Humboldtian view of the relationship between language and thought, but it was left to one of Sapir's pupils, Benjamin Lee Whorf, to present it in a sufficiently challenging form to attract widespread scholarly attention. Since the republication of Whorf's more important papers in 1956, the thesis that language determines perception and thought has come to be known as the Whorfian hypothesis.
Sapir's work has always held an attraction for the more anthropologically inclined American linguists. But it was Bloomfield who prepared the way for the later phase of what is now thought of as the most distinctive manifestation of American "structuralism." When he published his first book in 1914, Bloomfield was strongly influenced by Wundt's psychology of language. In 1933, however, he published a drastically revised and expanded version with the new title Language; this book dominated the field for the next 30 years. In it Bloomfield explicitly adopted a behaviouristic approach to the study of language, eschewing in the name of scientific objectivity all reference to mental or conceptual categories. Of particular consequence was his adoption of the behaviouristic theory of semantics according to which meaning is simply the relationship between a stimulus and a verbal response. Because science was still a long way from being able to give a comprehensive account of most stimuli, no significant or interesting results could be expected from the study of meaning for some considerable time, and it was preferable, as far as possible, to avoid basing the grammatical analysis of a language on semantic considerations. Bloomfield's followers pushed even further the attempt to develop methods of linguistic analysis that were not based on meaning. One of the most characteristic features of "post-Bloomfieldian" American structuralism, then, was its almost complete neglect of semantics. (see also Index: stimulus-response theory)
Another characteristic feature, one that was to be much criticized by Chomsky, was its attempt to formulate a set of "discovery procedures"--procedures that could be applied more or less mechanically to texts and could be guaranteed to yield an appropriate phonological and grammatical description of the language of the texts. Structuralism, in this narrower sense of the term, is represented, with differences of emphasis or detail, in the major American textbooks published during the 1950s.
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