American structuralism (also post-Bloomfieldian linguistics)

General term for variously developed branches of structuralismpioneered above all by E.Sapir (1884–1939) and L.Bloomfield (1887–1949). Although the various schools cannot be clearly distinguished from one another, a distinction is made between two general phases: the so-called ‘Bloomfield Era,’ anddistributionalism, with Z.Harris as chief representative. Common to all branches are certain scientific prerequisites which decisively influenced the specific methodological orientation of American structuralism. At first. an interest in dying Native American languages brought about interdisciplinary research in linguistics and anthropology. The occupation with culturally distant and as yet completely unresearched languages, which existed only orally, was a significant catalyst for the paroleoriented, purely descriptive methods of American structuralism (langue vs parole). The works of E.Sapir and F.Boas are significant (also field work). The theoretical and methodological format came to be determined in large part by the principles of behaviorist psychology (behaviorism). Following the natural sciences, this direction of research reduces the object of its investigation to sensorally perceptible data and draws on observations made in animal experiments to explain human behavior. This restriction to an exact analysis of objectively experienced data meant that the problem of meaning was deemed an extralinguistic phenomenon, whereas phonology and grammar were subject to a strictly formal analysis, based on the discovery procedures ofsegmentation and classification. Methodologically, American structuralism is characterized by empirical (empiricism) and inductive procedures, in which only the identification and arrangement of linguistic elements are relevant for grammatical description. (also antimentalism, descriptive linguistics,item-and-arrangement grammar).

American Structuralism

 n. A distinctive version of structuralism developed in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, strongly influenced by the work of Leonard Bloomfield, though it is clear that Bloomfield would not have approved of some of its more extreme characteristics. The American Structuralists (or ‘postBloomfieldians’) were often fieldworkers struggling to describe and record the dying languages of North America; they attached great importance to developing efficient and reliable techniques for analysing, describing and transcribing unfamiliar languages. Partly as a consequence, they were sometimes perceived by European linguists as hostile to theory, while they themselves occasionally sneered at the Europeans as ‘armchair theorists’.

The Americans championed the(autonomous) phoneme as the fundamental unit in phonology, and often preferred the termphonemics to phonology. They eventually developed a view of phonology distinguished by a remarkable battery of doctrines, including theseparation of levels and the conditions of biuniqueness, invariance, linearity and local determinacy. Motivated by a particular view of what constituted a scientific approach to language, these doctrines frequently compelled analyses which were inelegant and counterintuitive; the introduction of juncture phonemes and morphophonemesprovided only partial relief. But perhaps the single characteristic most objected to by a later generation of phonologists was the structuralist emphasis upon representations at the expense ofrules (generalizations); beginning with Halle (1959), which presented the celebrated Halle’s argument against structuralist doctrines, this priority was reversed, and within a few yearsgenerative phonology had supplanted American structuralist phonology as the mainstream in the United States. See Anderson (1985: chs 10–11) or Fischer-Jørgensen (1975: ch. 6) for an account of American Structuralist phonology, Makkai (1972) for a collection of classic papers, Stark (1972) or Huddleston (1972) for a more general account of American Structuralism, and Newmeyer (1986) for an account of the confrontation between structuralism and generative linguistics. See also criteria for phonological analysis.