4.

41478 – Survey of Linguistic Theories Semester 1, 2012: Lecture 11 1

Lecture 11: American Structuralism

In America, linguistics began as an offshoot of anthropology: at the beginning of the 20th

century. Anthropologists were eager to record the culture of the fast-dying American
Indian tribes, and their languages were, of course, a fundamental aspect of their cultures.
A programme was undertaken to record the Amerindian languages, large number of which
were in danger of extinction. Although quite interesting, the work of those early
researchers was rather haphazard, and unsystematic. There were no firm guidelines or
methodologies for linguists to follow in their attempt to describe unwritten languages.

Leonard Bloomfield (1887 – 1949) got interested in language from a scientific,

descriptive viewpoint. He believed that linguistics, just like the natural sciences, should
deal objectively and systematically with observable data.

In 1933 he published his masterpiece, called simply Language, which attempted to lay
down rigorous procedures for the description of any language. It had a profound influence
on linguistics, for it was a clear statement of principles that soon became generally
accepted, such as

 that language study must always be centred on the spoken language, as against
written documents;
 that the definitions used in grammar should be based on the forms of the language,
not on the meanings of the forms; and
 that a given language at a given time is a complete system of sounds and forms that
exist independently of the past – so that the history of a form does not explain its
actual meaning.

The Americans developed techniques for phonemic analysis, which they used to identify
which sounds in a language were phonemic and which were allophonic. They would then
identify which allophones belonged to which phonemes. The methods, which the
American Structuralists developed, are still in use today by fieldworkers when they try to
record unknown languages. For the American Structuralists, the phoneme was the most
basic element.

Bloomfield and his followers were more interested in the forms of linguistic items, and in
the way the items were arranged, than in meaning (semantics). Meaning, according to
Bloomfield, was not observable using rigid methods of analysis, and it was therefore ‗the
weak point in language study.‘

Bloomfield had immense influence – the so-called ‗Bloomfieldian era‘ lasted for more
than 20 years. During this time, linguists focused mostly on writing descriptive grammars
of unwritten languages. This involved first, collecting sets of utterances from native
speakers of these languages, and second, analysing the corpus of collected data by
studying the phonological and syntactic patterns of the language concerned, as far as
possible without reference to meaning. Items were (in theory) identified and classified
solely on the basis of their distribution within the corpus.
4.41478 – Survey of Linguistic Theories Semester 1, 2012: Lecture 11 2

In the course of writing such grammars, a number of problems arose, which could not be
solved by the methods proposed by Bloomfield, so a lot of time was spent to refine the
analytical techniques and methods. For American structuralists, the ultimate goal of
linguistics was the perfection of the discovery procedures – a set of principles which
would enable them to ‗discover‘ in a foolproof way the linguistic units of an unwritten
language. Because of their overriding interest in the internal patterns, or ‗structures‘ of
language, they are sometimes labelled ‗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 became an
abstract subject of little interest to anyone outside it. A radical change had to take place for
linguistics to survive as a ‗living‘ science.

From Encyclopaedia Britannica Deluxe edition 2004 CD-ROM

Bloomfield, Leonard ~ born April 1, 1887, Chicago, Ill., U.S.
died April 18, 1949, New Haven, Conn.

American linguist whose book Language (1933) was one of the most important general treatments of
linguistic science in the first half of the20th century and almost alone determined the subsequent course of
linguistics in the United States.

Bloomfield was educated at Harvard University and the universities of Wisconsin and Chicago. Hetaught
from 1909 to 1927 at several universities before becoming professor of Germanic philology at the University
of Chicago (1927–40) and professor of linguistics at Yale University (1940–49).

Concerned at first with the details of Indo-European—particularly Germanic—speech sounds and word
formation, Bloomfield turned to larger, more general, and wider ranging considerations of language science
in An Introduction to the Study of Language (1914). He then began (1917) pioneer studies of the Malayo-
Polynesian (Austronesian) languages, especially Tagalog. In the early 1920s he began his classic work on
North American Indian languages, contributing the first of many descriptive and comparative studies of the
Algonquian family.

In the writing of Language, Bloomfield claimed that linguistic phenomena could properly and successfully
be studied when isolated from their nonlinguistic environment. Adhering to behaviourist principles, he
avoided all but empirical description.

Structural linguistics in America

American and European structuralism shared a number of features. In insisting upon the
necessity of treating each language as a more or less coherent and integrated system,
both European and American linguists of this period tended to emphasize the structural
uniqueness of individual languages.
There was especially good reason to take this point of view given the conditions in which
American linguistics developed from the end of the 19th century. There were hundreds of
indigenous American Indian languages that had never been previously described. Many of
these were spoken by only a handful of speakers and, if they were not recorded before they
became extinct, would be permanently inaccessible. Under these circumstances, such
linguists as Franz Boas (died 1942) were less concerned with the construction of a
general theory of the structure of human language than they were with prescribing sound
methodological principles for the analysis of unfamiliar languages. They were also fearful
4.41478 – Survey of Linguistic Theories Semester 1, 2012: Lecture 11 3

that the description of these languages would be distorted by analyzing them in terms of
categories derived from the analysis of the more familiar Indo-European languages.
After Boas, the two most influential American linguists were Edward Sapir (died 1939)
and Leonard Bloomfield (died 1949). Like his teacher Boas, Sapir was equally at home in
anthropology and linguistics, the alliance of which disciplines has endured to the present
day in many American universities. Boas and Sapir were both attracted by Humboldt‟s
view of the relationship between language and thought, but it was left to one of Sapir's
pupils, Benjamin Lee Whorf, to present it in a sufficiently challenging form to attract
widespread scholarly attention. Since the republication of Whorf's more important papers
in 1956, the thesis that language determines perception and thought has come to be known
as the Whorf hypothesis.

Sapir's work has always held an attraction for the more anthropologically inclined
American linguists. But it was Bloomfield who prepared the way for the later phase of
what is now thought of as the most distinctive manifestation of American ―structuralism.‖
When he published his first book in 1914, Bloomfield was strongly influenced by Wundt's
psychology of language. In 1933, however, he published a drastically revised and
expanded version with the new title Language; this book dominated the field for the next
30 years. In it Bloomfield explicitly adopted a behaviouristic approach to the study of
language, eschewing, in the name of scientific objectivity, all reference to mental or
conceptual categories. Of particular consequence was his adoption of the behaviouristic
theory of semantics according to which meaning is simply the relationship between a
stimulus and a verbal response. Because science was still a long way from being able to
give a comprehensive account of most stimuli, no significant or interesting results could
be expected from the study of meaning for some considerable time, and it was preferable,
as far as possible, to avoid basing the grammatical analysis of a language on semantic
considerations. Bloomfield's followers pushed even further the attempt to develop
methods of linguistic analysis that were not based on meaning. One of the most
characteristic features of ―post-Bloomfieldian‖ American structuralism, then, was its
almost complete neglect of semantics.

Another characteristic feature, one that was to be much criticized by Chomsky, was its
attempt to formulate a set of “discovery procedures”—procedures that could be applied
more or less mechanically to texts and could be guaranteed to yield an appropriate
phonological and grammatical description of the language of the texts. Structuralism, in
this narrower sense of the term, is represented, with differences of emphasis or detail, in
the major American textbooks published during the 1950s.

Linguistic Relativism
If linguistic concepts do not exist to be discovered in the ‗real world‘, do we construct/
create them? (relativism: ‗Man is the measure of all things‘)
Are we all different in our construction of categories? (Example: Guugu Timithirr people
of Cape York Peninsula in NE Australia do not have words for ‗left‘ or ‗right,‘ ‗front‘ or
‗back‘ – they use absolute, rather than relative directions, i.e., South, North, East, West,
etc.)
This has serious implications for translation: Can we understand one another? Is it
possible to translate an idea exactly from one language into another?
4.41478 – Survey of Linguistic Theories Semester 1, 2012: Lecture 11 4

Ethnolinguistics is concerned with these sorts of questions. Anthropologists have found

that learning about how people categorize things in their environment provides important
insights into the interests and values of their culture. Field workers involved in this type of
research call it ethnoscience* (that is how you get these weird white guys in some remote
villages of PNG, eager to undergo initiation! )

Ethnoscientists have made a useful distinction in regard to ways of describing categories of

reality. ‗Outsiders‘ bring their own culture‘s categories and interpret everything through those
terms/cultural filters/perceptions. An ethno-scientist tries to get the ‗insider‘s look‘ at things:

Etic categories involve a classification according to some external system of analysis (it assumes
that ultimately, there is an objective reality, and that it is more important than cultural perceptions
of it) [‗outside‘]

Emic categories involve a classification according to the way in which members of a society
classify their own world. It may tell us little about objective reality, but it is very insightful in
understanding how other people perceive that reality through the filter/prism of their language and
culture [‗inside‘ view].

In other words, ethnoscientists try to cast off the ‗lens‘ of their own cultural perspective
and experience another culture from ‗inside‘. Taken to extreme, this relativist approach
denies our common humanity (those three principles of human understanding that David
Hume described in his Enquiry) and looks for different type of logic in every culture.
Ultimately, it provides a basis for racial discrimination, building ethnic walls to divide
people.
The Sapir–Whorf „Hypothesis‟
Edward Sapir* (1884-1939) & Benjamin Whorf** (1897-1941) claimed that language
influences our worldview. likening language to a polarizing lens on a camera, filtering
reality.
* One of the foremost American linguists and anthropologists of his time, most widely known for
his contributions to the study of North American Indian languages. A founder of ethnolinguistics,
which considers the relationship of culture to language, he was also a principal developer of the
American (descriptive) school of structural linguistics.
Sapir suggested that man perceives the world principally through language. He wrote many articles
on the relationship of language to culture. A thorough description of a linguistic structure and its
function in speech might, he wrote in 1931, provide insight into man's perceptive and cognitive
faculties and help explain the diverse behaviour among peoples of different cultural
backgrounds‖(1).
** U.S. linguist noted for his hypotheses regarding the relation of language to thinking and
cognition … .
Under the influence of Edward Sapir, … Whorf developed the concept of the equation of culture
and language, which became known as the Whorf hypothesis, or the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
Whorf maintained that the structure of a language tends to condition the ways in which a speaker
of that language thinks. Hence, the structures of different languages lead the speakers of those
languages to view the world in different ways. This hypothesis was originally put forward in the
18th century by the German scholars J.G.Herder and W. von Humboldt. It was espoused in the
United States in the period preceding World War II by Sapir and then in the 1940s by Whorf.
Whorf's formulation and illustration of the hypothesis excited considerable interest. On the basis of
his research and fieldwork on American Indian languages, he suggested, for example, that the way
4.41478 – Survey of Linguistic Theories Semester 1, 2012: Lecture 11 5

a people view time and punctuality may be influenced by the types of verbal tenses in their
language. Whorf concluded that the formulation of ideas is part of (or influenced by) a particular
grammar and differs as grammars differ. This position and its opposite, that culture shapes
language, have been much debated (1).
‗The fact of the matter is that the ‗real world‘ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on
the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be
considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies
live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.‘ (Sapir,
1929).

‗The linguistic relativity principle,‘ … means, in informal terms, that users of markedly
different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations
and different evaluations of extremely similar acts of observation, and hence are not
equivalent as observers, but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world‘ (Whorf
quoted in 1952).

What did Sapir mean by ‗language habit‘? Or Whorf, for that matter, by being ‗pointed by
their grammars‘?

Remember: Language involves the systematic organization of ideas – categorisation of

patterns in the world, whether these be patterns of concrete objects, or of abstract ideas.
These patterns are the ‗habits‘ Sapir described.

In short, the „Whorf Hypothesis‟ states that:

1. Linguistic structure and language habits shape perception
2. The structure of anyone‘s language determines/strongly influences the worldview
they will acquire as they learn the language
3. Structural differences between language systems will, in general, be parallelled by
non-linguistic cognitive differences in the native speakers of the languages (i.e.,
linguistic structures predetermine not only how, but also what we think).

Since neither Sapir, nor Whorf ever formulated the hypothesis themselves, there is some
controversy as to their actual views. Below is an example of the strong deterministic
reading of their ideas:

‗The argument that language defines the way a person behaves and thinks has existed
since the early 1900s when Edward Sapir first identified the concept. He believed that
language and the thoughts that we have are somehow interwoven, and that all people are
equally affected by the confines of their language. In short, he made all people out to be
mental prisoners; unable to think freely because of the restrictions of their vocabularies.‘
Example: George Orwell‘s 1984: ‘newspeak’

‗… Whorf fully believed in linguistic determinism; that what one thinks is fully
determined by their language. He also supported linguistic relativity, which states that the
differences in language reflect the different views of different people. An example of this
is the studies Whorf did on the Hopi language. He studied a Hopi speaker who lived in
New York city near Whorf. He concluded that Hopi speakers do not include tense in their
sentences, and therefore must have a different sense of time than other groups of people.
4.41478 – Survey of Linguistic Theories Semester 1, 2012: Lecture 11 6

However, in recent years, the Hopi have been studied in order to further understand this
issue, and it has been discovered that although the Hopi do not include references to the
past, present, or future in their grammars, they do include two other tenses, ‗manifested‘
and ‗being manifested.‘ ‗Manifested‘ includes all that is and has ever been, physically.
This includes the senses and concrete items. ‗Becoming manifested‘ includes anything
which is not physical, has no definite origin and cannot be perceived with the senses.
Verbs are always expressed within the terms of these two tenses. In this way, the Hopi do
include some aspect of time, but in a different way than a native English speaker would
recognize.‖

‗If the world view and behaviour of people are affected so severely by the structure of
their language, and languages have different structures, then is cross-cultural
communication and understanding a realistic goal for the modern world? Whorf would
have us believe that such barrier-free communication is almost impossible. However, does
that explain current world trade agreements, joint business ventures with foreign
companies or the emphasis on raising bilingual societies? Sure, not every word of
communication between people of different language communities is expressed. But
despite that fact, … the substance of messages are getting across.‘

‗… I believe that language users sort out and distinguish their experiences differently
according to the categories provided by their languages. One culture could consider a tree
to be an inanimate object. Another culture could consider it to be a living thing, just like a
human. The grammar of each language would reflect this difference, and the idea of what
a tree is to the two groups would be physically similar, but carry different connotations
and emotional responses. … These grammatical distinctions may have an effect on the
way the noun … is thought of. This is an aspect of language which has a direct effect on
the connotation of the term.‘

‗… I believe that discussion about this topic is an important part of the globalisation and
cultural education in the world today. Through theories like this one, we can identify ways
in which all languages are universal, and how that universality in language is beneficial to
us all. I think that when all people realize that no matter which language you speak or
which cultural norms you are used to, everyone is capable of intellectual thoughts, poetic
visions, technical jargon, and personal feelings – according to their own experiences, the
world will be a much smaller place‘(2).

As we can see from the above excerpts, the author strongly rejects the idea that language
determines thought. But did Sapir & Whorf really claim that all thought is linguistic /
determined by our language? Or did they simply point out the close interrelationship
between our perceptions and thought (and therefore, language) that we have just finished
talking about?
Many people believe that Sapir and Whorf had been misunderstood (see: below).

Appendix: Critique of the ‘Hypothesis’:

Source: Danny K. H. Alford: Part I: Demise of the Whorf Hypothesis.
Retrieved 17 April 2006 from: http://www.enformy.com/dma-dwh.htm

‗A burning question for every aware individual at some point has to be: What power does language
have to shape reality? … all true agreements between human beings must occur through the use of
language—especially the vague agreements about what English words stand for, by which you are
4.41478 – Survey of Linguistic Theories Semester 1, 2012: Lecture 11 7

able right now to read my thoughts. … how do the words you utter help create your own personal
reality (e.g., neuroses and psychosomatic ailments)?
…
Benjamin Whorf wrote about this notion in the 1930s, but most of his articles were never printed
in his lifetime…. Unfortunately for Whorf, the incredible amount of national attention focused on
Noam Chomsky and his generative transformational grammar in the late '50s and early '60s
resulted in resounding denunciations of Whorf by Chomskyan proponents—and in that highly
negative atmosphere, it was not fashionable among linguists to read Whorf or discuss his ideas in
public.‘

‗… Whorf never selected out of his vast number of provocative and intuitive insights into
language, thinking, culture, behavior, psychology and consciousness, any specific few to be
labelled "the Whorf Hypothesis." That such a narrowing of attention has taken place at all is … an
injustice … since almost all references to the Whorf Hypothesis are negative. Who narrowed the
attention in this way? Roger Brown seems to think Eric Lenneberg was responsible, … when he
stated in 1953:

‗Whorf appeared to put forward two hypotheses:

1. Structural differences between language systems will, in general, be paralleled by non-

linguistic cognitive differences, of an unspecified sort, in the native speakers of the
language.

2. The structure of anyone's native language strongly influences or fully determines the
worldview he will acquire as he learns the language (4:158).‘

The first hypothesis does loosely correspond to Whorf's linguistic relativity principle. The second,
however, is the basis of what has come to be called linguistic determinism.‘

Four major doctrines of the Whorf Hypothesis found in the critical literature:
 The first doctrine - linguistic determinism: language determines thought and behaviour
patterns (causal determination)
 The second doctrine - perception shaping (i.e., ‗language shapes colour perception‘).
Critics vehemently denounced Whorf‘s ‗Hypothesis,‘ arguing that as a matter of fact, most
of the evidence goes in the opposite direction, that linguistic skill depends very heavily
upon a pre-existing perceptual capacity. According to them, Whorf claimed that
perception is linguistically shaped:

‗… the doctrine of extreme linguistic relativity holds that each language performs the coding of
experience into sound in a unique manner. Hence, each language is semantically arbitrary relative
to every other language. According to this view, the search for semantic universals is fruitless in
principle. The doctrine is chiefly associated in America with the names of Edward Sapir and B. L.
Whorf. Proponents of this view frequently offer as a paradigm example the alleged total semantic
arbitrariness of the lexical coding of color‘ (Ibid., Berlin & Kay).

 The third doctrine of the Whorf Hypothesis - that of language nontranslatablity based on
the lack of lexical distinctions (the absence or presence of a lexical distinction = an
indicator of a corresponding perceptual or conceptual distinction). Critics argued that this
is patently false as shown by Whorf's own linguistic behaviour in his ability to translate
the many Eskimo terms for snow into English phrases.
One of Whorf's chief topics concerned the phenomenon of ordinary or habitual thinking
and consciousness (i.e., the way we are forced to conceive of a geocentric universe when
we use frozen lexical idioms such as "sunrise" and "sunset"), Whorf felt there were certain
ways of getting out of such language traps: by precise terminology ("earthturn" more
4.41478 – Survey of Linguistic Theories Semester 1, 2012: Lecture 11 8

precisely describes what happens in a heliocentric solar system), and through the insights
of comparative linguistics:

‗It is the "plainest" English which contains the greatest number of unconscious assumptions about
nature . . . We handle even our plain English with much greater effect if we direct it from a
vantage point of multi-lingual awareness.‘ (Ibid., Whorf).
‗The person most nearly free in such respects would be a linguist familiar with very many widely
different systems.‘ (Ibid., Whorf).

 The fourth doctrine of the Whorf ‗Hypothesis‘ concerns the charge that Whorf was guilty
of circularity of evidence:
‗The problem with Whorf's data is simply that they are not entirely linguistic; he neither
collected nor reported any non-linguistic data and yet all of his assertions . . . imply the
existence of non-linguistic cognitive differences. As the case stands in Whorf's own
writings, differences of linguistic structure are said to correspond with differences of a
non-linguistic kind, but the only evidence for these latter is the linguistic evidence with
which he began.‘ (Ibid., Roger Brown)

‗We have seen that the four major objections encountered in the literature concerning the so-called
Whorf Hypothesis are strawman arguments insofar as they pretend to represent the views of
Benjamin Whorf. The objections reflect, indeed, the prejudices and misinterpretations of their
authors, and perhaps should be named in honor of them instead.
I regret that I have not been able in this presentation to explicate the principle of relativity itself,
showing how closely its wording corresponds to statements of Einsteinian relativity (which few
critics have yet perceived), nor have I had time to explore what is probably by far the deepest
reason for the rejection of Whorf during the Chomskyan era—the fundamental clash between
notions of semantic relativity and the ethnocentric quest for semantic universals.

Linguistics … is in a period of confusion again: as it was in the early 1930s when Bloomfield
battled Sapir for discipline supremacy, when structuralism won out over mentalism and semantics;
as it was in the late 1950s when Whorf's semantic relativity momentum was broken by Chomsky's
neo-structuralism and notions of universal grammar. Both Bloomfield and Chomsky believed that
they could study language as an AUTONOMOUS creature apart from both semantics and
culture—that a true split could be made between linguistics and anthropology; that linguistics was
essentially the study of lifeless forms. Sapir and Whorf believed the opposite: that language and
culture are two sides of a single coin; that, in Whorf's words, linguistics is essentially the quest of
that "golden something" called meaning, and that its real concern is to light up the thick darkness
of language and thereby much of the thought, culture, and outlook upon life of a given community.
To do this requires a holistic, gestaltic approach rather than the linear approach more suited to
studying decontextualized forms.
…
I've attempted here to clear away the profuse underbrush of fuzzy criticism which has distinctly
tainted Whorf's reputation, in order to encourage linguists and others to examine Whorf in the
original Whorf will probably not teach linguists to be better language technicians. But if one's goal
as a student of language is to understand the larger issues of how human language, knowledge,
culture, behavior, meaning, and consciousness interact: then I … refer you to his material.‘