Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 68 views

    American Structuralism Final

    Uploaded by

    Faisal Sharif
    American Structuralism was an approach to linguistics that developed in the early 20th century led by Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Lee Whorf. It was influenced by Leonard Bloomfield who argued that linguistics should be studied scientifically and objectively like the natural sciences. The goals were to discover the fundamental units of language through rigorous analysis of observable data rather than introspection. This led to the idea that language determines thought, known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Whorf further developed this idea and believed language fully determines one's perceptions.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    American Structuralism Final

    Uploaded by

    Faisal Sharif
    68 views11 pages
    American Structuralism was an approach to linguistics that developed in the early 20th century led by Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Lee Whorf. It was influenced by Leonard Bloomfield who argued that linguistics should be studied scientifically and objectively like the natural sciences. The goals were to discover the fundamental units of language through rigorous analysis of observable data rather than introspection. This led to the idea that language determines thought, known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Whorf further developed this idea and believed language fully determines one's perceptions.

    Original Title

    American Structuralism final-converted

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    American Structuralism was an approach to linguistics that developed in the early 20th century led by Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Lee Whorf. It was influenced by Leonard Bloomfield who argued that linguistics should be studied scientifically and objectively like the natural sciences. The goals were to discover the fundamental units of language through rigorous analysis of observable data rather than introspection. This led to the idea that language determines thought, known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Whorf further developed this idea and believed language fully determines one's perceptions.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    68 views11 pages

    American Structuralism Final

    Uploaded by

    Faisal Sharif
    American Structuralism was an approach to linguistics that developed in the early 20th century led by Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Lee Whorf. It was influenced by Leonard Bloomfield who argued that linguistics should be studied scientifically and objectively like the natural sciences. The goals were to discover the fundamental units of language through rigorous analysis of observable data rather than introspection. This led to the idea that language determines thought, known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Whorf further developed this idea and believed language fully determines one's perceptions.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 11

    American Structuralism

    Shafqat Zaidi
    Roots of American Structuralism

    Franz Boas

    Bloomfield
    Sapir

    Whorf
    Leonard Bloomfield (1887 – 949)
    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.
    Language study must always be centered on the
    spoken language, as against written documents;
    Definitions used in grammar should be based on the
    forms of the language, not on the meanings of the
    forms
    Language at a given time is a complete system of
    sounds and forms that exist independently
    Phoneme was the most basic element.
    Meaning, according to Bloomfield, was not
    observable using rigid methods of analysis,
    and it was therefore ‗the weak point in
    language study.‘
    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.
    Franz Boas (died 1942) less concerned with the
    construction of a general theory of the structure of
    human language than prescribing sound
    methodological principles for the analysis of
    unfamiliar languages.
    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.
    language determines perception and thought has
    come to be known as the Whorf hypothesis.
    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.
    Sapir suggested that man perceives the world
    principally through language.
    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.
    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.

    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.
    Characteristics of American Structuralism

    Corpus-based
    Examples from observation, not from
    introspection
    Taxonomic: no universals
    Bottom-Up: phonetics, phonology, etc…
    Each level is autonomous
    Based on early 1900s ideas: behaviorism,
    Problems with American Structuralism

    Neglected Syntax
    Ignored Meaning
    Bottom-Up: This approach limits what can
    be done
    Behaviorism “Behaviorism is a theory in the
    philosophy of mind which maintains that talk
    of mental events should be translated into talk
    about observable behavior. Behaviorism parts
    company with dualistic traditions which hold
    that mind is a distinct substance from material
    bodies” (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
    www.utm.edu/research/iep/b/behavior.htm

    You might also like