Postgraduate Programme

Department of English
College of Arts
University of Mosul
General Linguistics/1st Course
(2023-2024)

AMERICAN STRUCTURALISM

Presented by

Amina Ahmed

Overview

In America, linguistics began as an offshoot of anthropology. Around the

beginning of the 20th century, anthropologists were eager to record the culture of
the fast-dying American Indian tribes, and the American Indian languages were
one aspect of this. Although often interesting, the early scholar's work was
primarily haphazard and lacking cohesion; linguistics had no firm guidelines to
follow when describing exotic languages. This state of affairs changed with the
publication 1933 of Leonard Bloomfield's comprehensive work entitled Simply
Language, which attempted to lay down rigorous procedures for describing any
language (Aitchison,1987).
Generally speaking, American schools did not use the terms, namely syntagmatic
and paradigmatic. Bloomfield’s definition of a language that all historical study of
language is based on suggests that the comparison of two or more sets of
 For descriptive data to describe a language, one needs no historical knowledge; if
we have such knowledge and allow it to influence our knowledge, it is bound to
distort the data (Bloomfield, 1935).

 The Pioneers of American Structuralism

 Franz Boas (1859-1942)
Franz Boas was the first anthropologist and linguist who undertook geography.
Research in northern Canada. He became fascinated with the Inuit people and
decided to become an ethnographer. Boas stressed that
(1) All cultures and languages are equal worth.
(2) There was no such thing as a primitive language
(3) Language is an inseparable part of culture. Boas was among the
first to require ethnographers to learn the native language of the
culture under study and to document verbal culture, such as myths
and legends in the original language (Franz, 1911).

 Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf

The anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf
created the Sapir-Whorf- hypothesis, which includes two principles as follows:

a. Linguistic Relativity: This principle indicates that the structure of our

language must influence how we perceive the world.
b. Linguistic Determinism: This principle holds that language determines
thought, i.e., we can only think in the categories our thoughts provide. For
example, English speakers use one word for "snow " and generally see all that
 white stuff as one thing. Eskimos look out at all white stuff and see it as
different things because they have many different words for "snow" (Yule,
2014 ).
 Bloomfield (1887–1949)
Bloomfield gives American structuralism its fundamental form, making
linguistics an autonomous field. His principal concern was to develop
linguistics as a science. Bloomfield’s (1933) Language is considered a
milestone in linguistics, the foundation of American structuralist linguistic
thinking. Bloomfield was also heavily influenced by behaviourist psychology.
He accepted the Boasian prohibition against generalising, but at the same time,
he denied the relevance of “mind”; that is, he opposed the mentalism that had
characterised the American linguistics of Boas, Sapir, and their students.
It is worth mentioning that Bloomfield is the most prominent figure in
American structuralism since he considered that linguistics should deal
objectively and systematically with observable data (the data which can be
tested and observed). So, he was more interested in how items were arranged
than the meaning.

 Why did structural linguistics neglect the analysis of meaning?

Bloomfield illustrated his lack of focus towards meaning because meaning
cannot be analysed with rigorous methods, which will only be achieved when
human knowledge has advanced beyond what we have nowadays. That is,
studying meaning will be possible when all the items in a specific language are
given precise meaning. So, Many linguists concentrated on writing descriptive
grammars of unwritten languages. This involved:
1. finding native speakers of the language concerned and collecting sets of
utterances from them; and

2. Analysing the corpus of collected utterances by studying the phonological and

syntactic patterns of the language concerned without recourse to the meaning.

The ultimate goal of linguistics was the perfection of discovery procedures,i.e., a

set of principles or techniques which would enable the linguist to uncover the
linguistic units of an unwritten language.

 The Behaviorist Theory

The Behaviorist theory is a well-known psychological theory associated with
Scholars like Watson (an American psychologist) and Pavlov (a Russian
psychologist). Linguistics made use of this theory in many areas of research and
study, and this perhaps led to the development of a branch of linguistic studies that
relates linguistics to psychology or mind. Bloomfield is one of the earliest linguists
who used some principles of psychological school. These principles are:

1. Overt Behaviour: It means a distrust of all mentalistic terms like "mind”, "concept”,
"idea", and so on, and the rejection of introspection as a means of obtaining valid data;
it should be concerned with overt behaviour, not with observable mental states and
processes.

2. Equating Human Behaviour with Animal Behaviour: This means that there is no
The essential difference between human and animal behaviour. Apart from using
language by human beings, human beings and animals behave the same way when
looking for food to satisfy their hunger.
3. Minimize the role of instinct and other innate drives or faculties and emphasise
the part played by learning in its account of how animals and humans acquired
their behaviour patterns to stress nurture rather than nature.
4. Determinism (a mechanism): There lies great stress on predictability and causal
elements in the production of utterances (e.g. action…reaction, stimulus
... ... response).

Bloomfield's theory is based on the principle that the meaning of an expression is

either the stimulus that evokes it or the response that it evokes, a combination of
both ‚on a particular occasion of utterance.
In other words, Bloomfield attempted to define the meaning of a linguistic form as
the relation between the stimulus(S) and the response(R), which can be assessed by
resorting to the predisposing factors such as :

Feeling hungry and seeing this apple.

the light waves that strike Jill's eyes, etc.

Bloomfield concludes that meaning is the situation itself. He illustrates his view
through an example of the story of Jack and Jill. "Jack and Jill are two friends.
They are walking in the garden. Jill is hungry, and she sees an apple and, using
language, gets Jack to fetch it for her ".If she was alone or (if she had not been a
human), she would have first received a stimulus (S), which would have produced
a Reaction or Response; she would have made a move to get the apple. Since Jack
was with her, the stimulus produced not the reaction (R), but a linguistic reaction,
that of speaking to Jack, which we symbolised by (r)the sound waves resulting
from Jill created a linguistic stimulus for Jack.
 (s) which results in his non-linguistic reaction (R) of getting the apple. The
situation is symbolised by Bloomfield as follows:

S r………………………………….s R
Physical event verbal event verbal event Physical event

Drawbacks in Bloomfield’s Theory

Bloomfield's theory loses its force when we realise how many relevant
predisposing factors are known and unknowable (Palmer, 1981).

 Skinner’s Theory(1957)

A more elaborate theory claims to overcome this difficulty is the theory of

Skinner(1957). His essential arguments are:

1. Language behaviour can be accounted for in a way that is, in principle, no

different from the behaviour of rats in laboratory conditions.
2. The behaviour can be explained in terms of observable events without reference
to the internal structure of the organism.
3. Instead of Bloomfield's predisposing factors, we need a history of reinforcing
events to account for our behaviour (Palmer, 1981).

 The Post-Bloomfieldian Linguistics

The body of work published in the USA, mainly in the 1940s and 1950s by
Bernard Bloch, Zellig Harris, Charles Hockett, Georges Trager, Henry Lee Smith,
Archibald Hill, and Robert Hall(to mention but a few), was heavily influenced by
Bloomfield's book, Language (1933) which is variably referred to in the literature
as Bloomfieldian, Post-Bloomfieldian, taxonomic, descriptivist and structural. In
this entry, the term Post-Bloomfieldian American structural is preferred in order to
distinguish the work to be referred to from other American descriptive structural
work, such as that of Sapir and Whorf and European structuralism.

References:

- Yule, G. (2014). The study of language.

- Boas, F. (1911). Handbook of American Indian Languages.

- Aitcheson, J. (1987). Linguistics.

-Palmer, F. (1981). Semantics.

- Matthews , P.(2001). A Short History of Structural Linguistics.

- Lyons, J. (1981). Language and linguistics.