BY JOHN G. FOUGHT PRESENTED BY CHRIS FARINA FOR LING 739 OCTOBER 1, 2014 American Structuralism 1

Introduction Focus: Bloomfield (and Boas/Sapir)  Theory of language  View of linguistics Foundations  Dialectology  IE philology  Linguistic anthropology 2

1. Franz Boas Interest: Amerindian languages Methodology  Elicitation  Fieldwork  Transcription  Phonetic accuracy  Phonemic categorization  Analysis of tons of spoken discourse  Systematic paraphrasing and alterations  Covariation of meaning and forms Ethnographic focus  Language as the means culture is transferred  Four-field anthropology 3

Boas & Relativism 4 “Soft”/Community-oriented relativism: “cultural and linguistic categorization is imposed on experience in ways that differ from culture to culture and from language to language” (296)  Any such structure is equal to any other  Actually means: Stop imposing IE concepts Theoretical offshoots:  Sapir-Whorf hypothesis = “Hard” relativism  Ethnoscience = Structure-based semantics  Phonology-type analysis  Contrasting pieces compose meaning

2. Edward Sapir 5 Interests: Amerindian languages; psychology Methodology  Item and process  Word order  Composition, Affixation, Internal modification, Reduplication  Accent (stress/pitch)  Structure/Patterning  “…not in some mysterious function of a racial or social mind…”  “…outlines and demarcations and significances of conduct…” (298) Goal  Classify languages by patterns of use (using processes)  Include all means of expressing concepts and grammatical relations

3. Leonard Bloomfield 6 Interests: Tagalog; Algonquin What studying Amerindian languages does to someone  Inadequacy of IE-based systems  Word division is arbitrary and lacks applicable convention  Same structures can’t be used with Am. In. languages  Basic analytical element: Sentence, not word  No adequate criteria for word division in Am. In. languages

“Introduction to the Study of Language” 7 Theoretical framework: (Mentalist) psychology Methodology  Applied semantic contrastive analysis to overt forms  Organized results of analyses into formal structures  Selected/Edited language data to create a norm Explanation  Mental acts  Shape and significance of language of…  What is said  Linguistics as a field

“Language” 8 Contrastive analysis on overt forms  Establish structural categories for each language indiv. Hierarchical and relational structures  Form-meaning correspondence at each level  Semantic types created via collocation Taxemes: Kinds of grammatical forms 1. Modulation - suprasegmentals 2. Phonetic modification – phonemic segmentals 3. Order – sequence/arrangement 4. Selection – picks appropriate (sub)class Only meaningful in their relations/combinations Natural sciences must provide “exhaustive account of impersonal reality” (300)

Bloomfield’s Descriptive Linguistic Work 9 Tagalog Texts  No presupposed structure  Even basic categories (like N and V) are not assumed  Arises out of analysis  Inductive: Specific data  Formal structure  Structure is language specific  Not relabeled traditional, IE categories  Reflect structural map of Tagalog The Language of Science  Analyzes math as a technical sublanguage  “…lost forerunner of the generative approach to syntax…” (302)

4. Distributionalism 10 Methodology  Where/when forms occur  Opposed to semantic contrasts  Skeptical of meaning-based criteria  Critical threshold of difference  Complementary distribution privileged  Two forms with the same distribution had to be different No true synonyms a) Identical = always substitutable b) Forms with different meanings are not substitutable c) Forms always have different distribution d) Difference in form = distribution = meaning

Distributionalism, CONT. 11

5. Summary 12 Focus on contrastive distribution  Not contrastive meaning Organized distributional relationship by level  Top-down/bottom-up relations  Syntax, morphology, and phonology kept separate “The debt Transformational Grammar and linguistics itself owes to these now maligned books and their authors is difficult to measure, but is surely far greater than has ever been acknowledged” (305)