Structuralism.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 711.

Structuralism

1. Structuralism as a Mainstream of the 20^th c.

2. L. Bloomfield and His Era in Linguistics

3. Immediate Constituent Analysis

In the 20^th century, the emphasis shifted from language change to language description. Instead of looking at how a selection of items changed in a number of different languages, linguists began to concentrate on describing single languages at one particular point in time.

The term “structural linguistics” is sometimes misunderstood. It does not necessarily refer to a separate branch or school of linguistics. All linguistics since de Saussure is structural, as “structural” in this broad sense merely means the recognition that language is a pattered system composed of interdependent elements, rather than a collection of unconnected individual items. Misunderstandings sometimes arise because the label “structuralist” is often attached to the descriptive linguists who worked in the USA between 1930 and 1960.

A theory or method which assumes that the elements of a field of study make up a structure in which their interrelationship is more important than any element considered in isolation. Structuralist principles have been applied since the beginning of the 20^th century, primarily by francophone theorists, to various fields of interest: in linguistics it is associated with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure in Switzerland and Leonard Bloomfield in the US; in anthropology , with Claud Levi-Strauss in France; and in studies of history with Michael Foucault in France. Generally, structuralists follow de Saussure in emphasizing the arbitrary nature of the relationship between a sign and what it signifies, and in treating the objects of study as closed systems abstracted from their social and historical contexts.

The names of Z.S. Harris, String analysis of sentence structure (1962), C.F. Hockett A course in modern linguistics (1958), P.M. Postal Constituent structure: a study of contemporary models of syntactic description (1964), R.S. Wells Immediate constituents (1947) should be noted in this connection.

In America, linguists began to offshoot of anthropology. Around the beginning of the 20^th 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 work of those scholars was, for the most part, haphazard and lacking cohesion. There was no firm guidelines for linguists to follow when they attempted to describe exotic languages. This state of affairs changed with the publication in 1933 of Leonard Bloomfield's comprehensive work entitled simply “Language”, which attempted to lay down rigorous procedures for the description of any language. The immediate source of Bloomfield's syntactic theory was Wilhelm Wundt. In the preface to his 1914 monograph L. Bloomfield writes: "It will be apparent that I depend for my psychology, general and linguistic, entirely on Wundt; I can only hope that I have not misrepresented his doctrine. The day is past when students of mental sciences could draw on their own fancy or on popular psychology for their views of mental experience"

L. Bloomfield may well have been influenced by Wundt, but the analyses presented by L. Wundt appear in fact to be more reminiscent of dependency grammar than of constituency grammar, and W. Wundt's graphical representations look very much like dependency trees (with unlabelled arcs), half a century before L. Tesnière. But whatever W. Wundt may have intended, it was L. Bloomfield who introduced IC analysis into the linguistic mainstream, where it was picked up and developed by the American structuralists, and where it led ultimately to the development of our modern conception of constituent structure in the 1960s.

L. Bloomfield considered that linguistics should deal objectively and systematically with observable data. So he was more interested in the way items were arranged than with meaning. The study of meaning was not amenable to rigorous methods of analysis and was therefore, he concluded, “the weak point in language study, and will remain so until human knowledge advances very far beyond its present state”.

L. Bloomfield had immense influence – far more than the European linguists working during this period – and the so-called “Bloomfieldian era” lasted for more than twenty years. During this time, large numbers of linguists concentrated on writing descriptive grammars of unwritten languages. This involved first finding native speakers of the language concerned and collecting sets of utterances from them. It also involved analyzing the corpus of collected utterances by studying the phonological and syntactic patterns of the language concerned, as far as possible without recourse to meaning. Items were (in theory) identified and classified solely on the basis of their distribution within the corpus.

In the course of writing such grammars, a number of problems arose which could not be solved by the methods proposed by L. Bloomfield. So an enormous amount of attention was paid to the refinement of analytical techniques. For many, the ultimate goal of linguistics was the perfection of discovery procedures – a set of principles which would enable linguist to “discover” in a foolproof way the linguistic units of an unwritten language. Because of their overriding interest in the internal patterns or “structure” of the language, such linguists are sometimes labeled “structuralists”.

The Bloomfieldians laid down a valuable background of linguistic methodology for future generations. But linguistics also became very narrow. Trivial problems of analysis became major controversial issues, and no one who was not a linguist could understand the issues involved. By around 1950 linguistics had lost touch with other disciplines and become an abstruse subject of little interest to anyone outside. It was ready for a revolution.