An introduction to the American structuralism
American structuralism is a branch of synchronic linguistics that emerged independently in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. It developed in a very different style from that of the Europe, under the leadership of the anthropolist F. Boas.
Specialized in the anthropology of North America, Boas worked as organizer of a survey of the many indigenous languages of America north of Mexico. The result of the survey was the book Handbook of American Indian Languages. Boas wrote several chapters for the book and an important introduction, which is still a good summary of the descriptive approach to language. Boas trained the men who investigated other languages.
Boas was a self-taught linguist, having never received any formal training in linguistics. This lack of professional qualification was in fact an advantage rather than a hindrance to his work. Unlike the Europeans who stressed the universals of language, Boas held that there was no ideal type or form of lineages, for human languages were endlessly diverse.
Like Boas, Sapir was an eminent anthropological linguist. Before meeting Boas in New York, Sapir was pursuing his Master’s degree in Germanic studies and felt confident that he understood the nature of language quite well. After meeting Boas, Sapir said he felt as though he had everything to learn. As a result, Sapir undertook the description of
American Indian languages after Boas’s method, using a native information in he own cultural surroundings. This is a novel experience for Sapir and radical departure from the traditional practice of trying to impose the grammatical categories of indo-European languages upon all other languages.
The principal representative of American descriptive linguistics is L. Bloomfiled. He is such a landmark figure in the history of American linguistics that the period between 1933 and 1950 is known as Bloomfiledian Era, in which American descriptive linguistics formally came into being and reached its prime development.
Bloomfiled’s language was once held as the model of scientific methodology and the greatest work in linguistics on both sides of the Atlantic in the twentieth century. For Bloomfield, linguistics is a branch of psychology known as behaviorism. Behaviorism is a principal of scientific method, based on the belief that human beings cannot know anything they have not experienced. Behaviorism in linguistics holds that children learn language through a chain of “stimulus-response reinforcement”, and the adult’s use of language is also a process of stimulus-response.
Influenced by Bloomfield’s language, American linguistis such as Z. S. Harris, C. Hockett, G. Trager, H. L. Smith, A. Hill, and R. Hall further developed strucralism, charaterised by a strict empiricism. With the
advent of the electronic computer in the 1950s, some linguists came to feel that an appropriate goal linguistics was to devise explicit discovery procedures to ensble the computer to process raw data about any language and form a complete grammar without intervention by the human linguist. Therefore, post-Bloomfieldian linguistics focused on direct observation: a grammar is discovered through the performing of certain operations on a corpus of data. The corpus of the data consists of speech, so the operation has to start from phonological analysis of the stream of sounds phonemes. Since phonemes form a variety of structures, they can be grouped into minimal recurrent sequences, or morphs, which are the members of the same morphemes. Besed on the discovery of morphemes of the language, the task of the linguist is to discover how the morphemes may be combined in order to write a grammar. The post-Bloomfieldian linguists also took an interest in the discourse level in order to develop discovery procedures for structure above the sentence level.