American Structuralism
1
BY JOHN G. FOUGHT
PRESENTED BY CHRIS FARINA
FOR LING 739
OCTOBER 1, 2014
Introduction
2
 Focus: Bloomfield (and Boas/Sapir)
 Theory of language
 View of linguistics
 Foundations
 Dialectology
 IE philology
 Linguistic anthropology
1. Franz Boas
3
 Interest: Amerindian languages
 Methodology

Elicitation


Fieldwork
Transcription
Phonetic accuracy
 Phonemic categorization


Analysis of tons of spoken discourse
Systematic paraphrasing and alterations
 Covariation of meaning and forms

 Ethnographic focus


Language as the means culture is transferred
Four-field anthropology
Boas & Relativism
4
 “Soft”/Community-oriented relativism:
“cultural and linguistic categorization is imposed on experience
in ways that differ from culture to culture and from language to
language” (296)
 Any such structure is equal to any other
 Actually means: Stop imposing IE concepts
 Theoretical offshoots:
 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis = “Hard” relativism
 Ethnoscience = Structure-based semantics
Phonology-type analysis
 Contrasting pieces compose meaning

2. Edward Sapir
5
 Interests: Amerindian languages; psychology
 Methodology
 Item and process
Word order
 Composition, Affixation, Internal modification, Reduplication
 Accent (stress/pitch)


Structure/Patterning
“…not in some mysterious function of a racial or social mind…”
 “…outlines and demarcations and significances of conduct…” (298)

 Goal
 Classify languages by patterns of use (using processes)
 Include all means of expressing concepts and grammatical
relations
3. Leonard Bloomfield
6
 Interests: Tagalog; Algonquin
 What studying Amerindian languages does to
someone

Inadequacy of IE-based systems
Word division is arbitrary and lacks applicable convention
 Same structures can’t be used with Am. In. languages


Basic analytical element: Sentence, not word

No adequate criteria for word division in Am. In. languages
“Introduction to the Study of Language”
7
 Theoretical framework: (Mentalist) psychology
 Methodology
 Applied semantic contrastive analysis to overt forms
 Organized results of analyses into formal structures
 Selected/Edited language data to create a norm
 Explanation
 Mental acts  Shape and significance of language of…
What is said
 Linguistics as a field

“Language”
8
 Contrastive analysis on overt forms

Establish structural categories for each language indiv.
 Hierarchical and relational structures


Form-meaning correspondence at each level
Semantic types created via collocation
 Taxemes: Kinds of grammatical forms
1. Modulation - suprasegmentals
2. Phonetic modification – phonemic segmentals
3. Order – sequence/arrangement
4. Selection – picks appropriate (sub)class
 Only meaningful in their relations/combinations
 Natural sciences must provide “exhaustive account of
impersonal reality” (300)
Bloomfield’s Descriptive Linguistic Work
9
 Tagalog Texts
 No presupposed structure
Even basic categories (like N and V) are not assumed
 Arises out of analysis
 Inductive: Specific data  Formal structure


Structure is language specific
Not relabeled traditional, IE categories
 Reflect structural map of Tagalog

 The Language of Science
 Analyzes math as a technical sublanguage
 “…lost forerunner of the generative approach to syntax…” (302)
4. Distributionalism
10
 Methodology
 Where/when forms occur
Opposed to semantic contrasts
 Skeptical of meaning-based criteria


Critical threshold of difference
Complementary distribution privileged
 Two forms with the same distribution had to be different

 No true synonyms
a) Identical = always substitutable
b) Forms with different meanings are not substitutable
c) Forms always have different distribution
d) Difference in form = distribution = meaning
Distributionalism, CONT.
11
 Language structure hierarchy
 Syntax
 Morphology
 Phonology
 Layers contain varying levels of meaning
 Zellig Harris


𝑢𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔 = 𝑖0 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑝ℎ𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑠
Goal: description wherein free combination is possible


No constraining grammatical rules
Account be known by Chomsky
5. Summary
12
 Focus on contrastive distribution
 Not contrastive meaning
 Organized distributional relationship by level
 Top-down/bottom-up relations
 Syntax, morphology, and phonology kept separate
“The debt Transformational Grammar and linguistics
itself owes to these now maligned books and their
authors is difficult to measure, but is surely far greater
than has ever been acknowledged” (305)