AMERICAN STRUCTURALISM
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 Bloomfield Bloomfield
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,
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.
NORTH
AMERICAN STRUCTURALISM CENTERS IN WHAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY SAY.
MAIN
TENETS
- Linguistic
is a descriptive science.
- the
primary form of the language is the spoken one.
- Every
language is a system on its own right.
- Language
is a system in which smaller units arrange systematically to form larger
ones
- Meaning
should not be part of linguistic analysis
- The
procedures to determine the units in language should be objective and
rigorous.
- Language
is observable speech, not knowledge.
Structuralism proposes the idea that many
phenomena do not occur in isolation, but instead occur in relation to each
other, and that all related phenomena are part of a whole with a definite, but
not necessarily defined, structure.
1.1 AMERICAN STRUCTURALISM : L. BLOOMFIELD
1.1.1.BEHAVIORISM AND SCIENCE
Behaviorism was a school of psychology. According to this school
science can only deal with physical facts. Statements must be based on these
physical characteristics. Thus, science must observe, describe physical facts
and induce descriptive generalizations.
1.1.2. LANGUAGE : STIMULUS AND RESPONSE
Human behaviour is studied in terms of stimulus and response,
consequently linguistic behaviour becomes also a pattern of stimulus and
response, where language plays a mediating role.
1.1.3. THE METHOD AND LIMITATIONS
Behaviorist linguists start their studies by recording speech, and
these samples will become the only basis for the study of language, in the form
of sphich corpus. Speech will be divided into sound segments and they will
observe these segments in their linguistic context. Finally, they will classify
those segments according to their distribution. However, this method made the
study of meaning very complex and probably outside the domain of linguistics,
and this is the main behaviorist limitation.
1.2. AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN STRUCTURALISM
American and European structuralism had the same objective:
describe and classify linguistic units, though they do not share the same
perspective. European structuralists deal with Saussure's notion of langue,
whereas Americans' perspective derived from the limitations of their
behaviorist method.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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