American Structuralism

Leonard Bloomfield (April 1, 1887 – April 18, 1949)

Bloomfield and his followers were more interested in the forms of linguistic items, and in the way the items were arranged, than in meaning (semantics). Meaning, according to Bloomfield, was not observable using rigid methods of analysis, and it was therefore ‗the weak point in language study.‘

Bloomfield had immense influence – the so-called ‗Bloomfieldian era‘ lasted for more than 20 years. During this time, linguists focused mostly on writing descriptive grammars of unwritten languages. This involved first, collecting sets of utterances from native speakers of these languages, and second, analysing the corpus of collected data by studying the phonological and syntactic patterns of the language concerned, as far as possible without reference to meaning. Items were (in theory) identified and classified solely on the basis of their distribution within the corpus.

For many American linguists, the beginning of their research was the study of indigenous languages due to fact that they were unknown in their previous phases so, there weren’t susceptible to diachronic investigation. This was precisely the fact that formed and distinguished the American structuralism and its methods.

As those languages couldn’t be described with the categories that were established by the traditional linguistics (noun, adjective, verb, etc.) researchers had to find new categories and, at the same time, noticed the ‘weaknesses' of the old languages that were based on the European ones. This conducted the American linguists to make studies that were more advanced than those of their European colleagues. Like a result of this, Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield became the two most important and influential linguists of their time.

was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics. He made significant contributions to Indo-European historical linguistics, the description of Austronesian languages, and description of languages of the Algonquian family.

The influence of Bloomfieldian structural linguistics declined in the late 1950s and 1960s as the theory of Generative Grammar developed by Noam Chomsky came to predominate.

American Structuralism

Edward Sapir (1884–1939)

The general types of devices that English has to express structural meaning are the use of form-words (inflections and derivations), the use of function words (prepositions, determiners, subordinators, etc.), the use of word order, and in some cases the use of stress and intonation.

Considering phonology as the starting point of any investigation, Bloomfield claims that "linguistic study must always start from the phonetic form and not from the meaning." And probably for this reason phonology is the field where structuralists made more advances.

American structuralists limited the area of language to be described by emphasizing language form as the single, objective, observable and verifiable aspect of language, thus relegating meaning to a subordinate place. For them, linguistic analysis should begin with an objective description of the forms of language and move from form to meaning.

During the XIX century and at the beginning of the XX century, linguistics in USA followed the same direction of the linguistic in Europe but after the end of the World War I, American linguists wanted to show their own linguistic characteristics.

Like in European studies, American linguistics also developed theories about synchronic linguistics. The importance of Saussure’s course in the development of that process has been a great deal of discussion. In 1922, Leonard Bloomfield wrote that Saussure had constructed the basis of the new linguistics.

was an American anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the early development of the discipline of linguistics.

Before Sapir it was generally considered impossible to apply the methods of historical linguistics to languages of indigenous peoples because they were believed to be more primitive than the Indo-European languages. Sapir was the first to prove that the methods of comparative linguistics were equally valid when applied to indigenous languages. In the 1929 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica he published what was then the most authoritative classification of Native American languages, and the first based on evidence from modern comparative linguistics.

The Sapir–Whorf „Hypothesis‟

Benjamin Lee Whorf ( April 24, 1897 – July 26, 1941) was an American linguist and fire prevention engineer. Whorf is widely known as an advocate for the idea that because of linguistic differences in grammar and usage, speakers of different languages conceptualize and experience the world differently. This principle has frequently been called the "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis", after him and his mentor Edward Sapir.

In short, the „Whorf Hypothesis‟ states that:

1. Linguistic structure and language habits shape perception

2. The structure of anyone‘s language determines/strongly influences the worldview they will acquire as they learn the language

3. Structural differences between language systems will, in general, be parallelled by non-linguistic cognitive differences in the native speakers of the languages (i.e., linguistic structures predetermine not only how, but also what we think).

American Structuralism contribution

Sapir established the basis of the phonologic structuralism while Bloomfield left mark in the study of morphology and syntax. However, both got separate to their respective conceptions of language. Sapir is on the top of what is called ‘American mentalism’ that is an interpretation of language which is strongly related to the mind. On the other hand, Bloomfield was the master and creator of the ‘anti mentalism’ that conducts to the dissociation of the signifiant and the signifié.

Although Bloomfield’s investigations have been of great importance for the American linguistics, his most relevant work was the development of the American structuralism.

The structural linguistics, also called descriptive linguistics, had its beginning in the USA with the apparition of Leonard Bloomfield’s paper (1887-1949, Language) and the studies of linguists such as Zelling Harris and Charles Hockett.

The most notable aspects that distinguish the American Structuralist school are:

It was inspired in the empiricism.

It was related to the conductivism’s theory (behaviorism) of the time of Watson and Skinner until the point of explaining the sign as the response of a intermediate stimulus (S→R).

It was thought that the structure of the language was upheld for two classes of subsystems: centrals and peripheries. The first were concerned about the grammatical system, the phonological system and the morphological systems while the other was concerned about the phonetic and the semantic systems.

It’s usually presented as a reaction against traditional grammar.

American structural linguists based their descriptions on objectively observable data, paying special attention to current speech.

American Structural Lingiustics