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.

2. American Structuralists

     A. Franz Boas (1859–1942)

Boas was the leading figure in anthropological work in early 20th century. Interested in describing the Amerindian cultures, particularly American Northwest  ones, Boas focused on languages because they represented the best channel for classifying the aboriginal cultures. He objected to the use of grammatical categories of the IndoEuropean languages in describing Native American languages. For him, such a tradition would distort the features of these languages. The most important publication of Franz Boas was the  Handbook of American Indian Languages (1911–1941).

       B. Edward Sapir (1884–1939)

Edward Sapir was one of the students of Franz Boas. He was himself an anthropologist and a linguist at the same time. His important  publication was his book Language (1921). Adopting a descriptive approach, he studied, together with Boas, a number of Amerindian disappearing languages. By and large, Sapir’s approach to language was based on the exploration of the relations with literature, music, anthropology and psychology. His outlooks on language insist on its impact on every part of human life. Sapir is well-known for a theory called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (also relativity, determinism, Humboldtism, or Whorfian Hypothesis). Developed after his death in the 1950s, it was the product of the beliefs of both Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897- 1941) on the relationship of language to thought. According to the strong version of the theory, our vision of the world is heavily determined by our language: the grammatical structures of a language shape its speakers’ perception of the world. Much criticism was levelled at the Sapir and Whorf hypothesis; for example, translating between languages is possible, and this process does not impose a change in world view. On that basis, a weaker version of the hypothesis appeared, stating that language influences thought.

     C. Leonard Bloomfield (1887–1949) 

Leonard Bloomfield is the father of modern American linguistics. His masterpiece in linguistic studies Language (1933), established the track of the scientific study of language in the United States till the early 1950s. Crucial in Bloomfield’s work was his influence by behaviouristic psychology, which rejects all that is non-physical or non-observable in search of being empiricist in approach. He conceived of language basically as couples of stimuli and responses. Bloomfield maintained that language should be studied like a natural science. Most importantly, he made influential contributions to the development of vigorous tools for the analysis of language.