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Lecture 3

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Lecture 3

ههه

Uploaded by

kheria1966sebahi
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Mila university Center

Linguistics third year


Teacher: Dr. BENNACER Fouzia
Lecture Three

American Structural Linguistics

Franz Boas (1858- 1942) is considered the founder of American linguistics and American

anthropology. His major concern was to obtain information on Native American languages and

cultures before they disappeared.

Edward Sapir -Boas' student- (1884–1939) did first-hand fieldwork on many American

Indian languages, contributed to historical linguistics (in Indo-European, Semitic, and numerous

Native American families). Sapir defended the perception that each language has its own sound

system, within which a determinate set of speech sounds are distinguished by specific features.

The Whorf (or Sapir-Whorf) hypothesis (known also as linguistic determinism/ linguistic

relativism) holds that a speaker's perception of the world is organized or constrained by the

linguistic categories his or her language offers, that language structure determines thought, how

one experiences and hence how one views the world. Whorf (1956 p. 20) claimed that “ people

who use languages with very different grammars are led by these grammars to typically different

observations and different values for outwardly similar observations”.

Leonard Bloomfield (1887–1949) is credited with giving American structuralism its

fundamental form, making linguistics an autonomous field of science. Bloomfield's (1933)

“Language” is considered a milestone in linguistics in which he put rigorous methods ‘discovery

Procedures’ (Immediate Constituent Analysis ICA) which are rules and principles that would

enable a linguist to discover in an exact way the description of any language. This book showed

that Bloomfield was influenced by both De Saussure's thinking and behaviorist psychology. He

defended that language study should deal objectively and systematically with observable data
Mila university Center
Linguistics third year
Teacher: Dr. BENNACER Fouzia
and describe what is being seen -external not internal-, hence, linguistics should focus on form

not meaning. Henceforth, Bloomfield’s ICA was criticised for neglecting meaning, not being

able to give clear directions in the case of binary cuttings such as: (That nice, efficient, old-

fashioned secretary) and the problem of pre-position and post-position, not being able to show

the relationship between sentences (passive/ active, affirmative/ negative…), not being able to

explain ambiguities in sentences.

Till then, structural linguistics was influenced by psychological behaviourism; in other

words, the psychologist can account for mental states through observing behaviour, the linguist

similarly can discover and describe language through describing already produced patterns.

However, this linguistic model was rejected by Chomsky who clarified that the corpus may

contain errors as it may not include enough illustrations of the phenomenon under investigation

(Sadiqi &Ennaji, 1999).

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