American Structuralism

1. Features of American Structuralism

Introduction

It is agreed upon that the American linguistic studies emerged from the institutes of anthropology rather than from the institutes of languages. The American scholars were anthropologists who developed structural ideas far away from European work. They worked on existing languages, the Amerindian languages. Field work techniques of anthropologists characterized their approach. These languages did not have written records or previous descriptions_as opposed to the European languages. Therefore, their historical aspects were discarded. The Amerindian languages were very different from the European ones. Thus, American structuralists, avoiding the prescriptive attitude, were in need to develop fresh descriptive frameworks fitting these languages’ actual features. American work emphasised the uniqueness of each language’s structure, similar to the European tradition. The leading figures of the American structural studies were Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Leonard Bloomfield.

Features of American Structuralism

In order to avoid the dangers implicit in traditional grammar, American linguists had the following aims:

•  To describe current spoken language, not dead languages.

• To focus on language form as a sole objective, thus neglecting meaning to a subordinate place.

• To perform the description of language using an organized, unprejudiced and meticulous method which allows the analyst to extract the grammar of a language from a corpus of recorded data in a quasi- mechanical way following four steps:

a) Field recordings of a corpus of data;

b) Segmentation of the utterances of the corpus at different levels: phoneme, morpheme, word, group, clause and sentence;

c) Listing an inventory of forms thus obtained from each level and stating the distribution (possible environment) of the forms;

d) Classifying the forms (by giving them names) and utterances of the language being studied.

Only such an essentially classificatory method could enable them, it was thought, to concentrate systematically without any predetermined framework, on the unique structure of the language under examination.