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American Structuralism Lecture 1

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24 views3 pages

American Structuralism Lecture 1

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Abdennour
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We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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University of Algiers 2 / Department of English / Theories of linguistics 2nd year

Mrs. BEZARI

American structuralism: Lecture 1

Introduction:

The term structuralism is underlined by the idea that many phenomena do not occur in
isolation, but instead they occur in relation to each other. All that related phenomena are part
of a whole with a definite, but not necessarily defined structure.

American linguistics began as an offshoot of anthropology and was motivated by the urgency
of studying and preserving the American Indian languages which were fast dying out.

1) The main principles:


• Linguistics is a descriptive science.
• The primary form of language is spoken.
• Speech is not affected by writing.
• Every language is a system on its own right.
• Language is a system in which smaller units arrange systematically to form larger
ones.
• Meaning should not be part of language analyses.
• Every language should be described objectively.
• Language is observable speech not abstract knowledge.

2) Method:
American investigations of language were mainly inductive; It was based on:

• First, collecting sets of utterances from native speakers of these languages, and
• Second, analyzing the corpus of collected data by studying the phonological and
syntactic patterns of the language concerned, as far as possible without reference to
meaning.

3) Influence of Psychology:

3.1) What is Behaviourism?

Behaviorism (also called the behaviorist approach) was the primary paradigm in psychology
between the 1920s to the 1950s. It was founded by the psychologist J B Watson, who was
influenced by Pavlov, a Russian psychologist. B.F Skinner developed these psychologist ideas
and claimed that language is a verbal behaviour.

Behaviourism is based on a number of underlying assumptions regarding methodology and


behavioral analysis:

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University of Algiers 2 / Department of English / Theories of linguistics 2nd year
Mrs. BEZARI

- Psychology should be seen as a science. Theories need to be supported by empirical


data obtained through careful and controlled observation and measurement of
behavior. Watson (1913) stated that “psychology as a behaviorist views it is a purely
objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is … prediction
and control”.
- Behaviorism is primarily concerned with observable behavior, as opposed to internal
events like thinking and emotion. Observable (i.e. external) behavior can be
objectively and scientifically measured. Internal events, such as thinking should be
explained through behavioral terms (or eliminated altogether).
- People have no free will – a person’s environment determines their behaviour.
- For Skinner, when born our mind is 'tabula rasa' (a blank slate). The Child acquires his
language through stimulus-response-reinforcement.
- There is little difference between the learning that takes place in humans and that in
other animals. Therefore research can be carried out on animals as well as humans.
- Behavior is the result of stimulus – response (i.e. all behavior, no matter how complex,
can be reduced to a simple stimulus – response association). Watson described the
purpose of psychology as: “To predict, given the stimulus, what reaction will take
place; or, given the reaction, state what the situation or stimulus is that has caused the
reaction” (1930, p. 11).

Along with Skinner, Bloomfield (1887-1949) was one of the main American structuralists
that were greatly influenced by Behaviourism. He was fiercely determined to establish
linguistics as a science, and tended to be methodical and preferred as much as possible to rely
upon evidence in formulating his hypothesis. He explicitly adopted behaviourism as a
framework for linguistics. Behaviourism, introduced in 1913 by the psychologist J.B. Watson,
is s school of psychology which seeks to explain animal and human behaviour entirely in
terms of observable and measurable responses to enviroenmental stimuli. This view was
further developed by the Russian philologist I.Pavlov and the American psychologist B.F
Skinner.

Bloomfield's book Language (1933) dominated the field for the next 30 years. In it he
explicitly adopted a behaviouristic approach to the study of language. He adopted the
behaviorist theory of semantics according to which meaning is simply the relationship
between a stimulus and a verbal response. Behaviorism was an American school of
psychology founded by John B. Watson, who insisted that all behavior is a physiological
response to environmental stimuli.

3.2) What does a scientific description mean for Bloomfield?

A scientific description for him should reject all data that are not directly observable or
physically measurable. For Bloomfield a certain stimulus caused someone to speak.

For structuralist behaviourists semantics was secondary and dependant on syntax, this is
because the aim of linguist was to describe a language as a purely formal system without
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University of Algiers 2 / Department of English / Theories of linguistics 2nd year
Mrs. BEZARI

referring to its use. Chomsky who shared these ideas at the beginning became later very
critical of them, and abandoned them altogether.

The two fundamental units of structural description are the ‘phoneme’ and the ‘morpheme’.
The linguists’ task is to describe which phonemes are significant in the language being
described. The concept of the morpheme was suggested in reaction against the word-based
grammars that were dominant in traditional grammar.

Bloomfield introduced ICA as an explicit technique of grammatical analysis. He illustrated


the way in which it was possible to take a sentence (he chose: Poor John ran away) and split it
up into immediate constituents. In other words, the sentences is not seen as a sequence of
elements, as being made up of layers of constituents.

Problems with ICA:

• Sometimes it is not clear where to put the cut in a given sentence. Sometimes we need
a ‘binary splitting method but sometimes we need a ‘ternary’ one at other times. The
existence of so many alternative analyses, then, constitutes a major problem.
• It does identify the constituent parts o the sentence being analyzed: are they NP, N,
VP, V etc?
• It does not clearly show that NPs are built on Ns, VPs on Vs. It is important to
recognize grammatical categories; otherwise, a linguist that does not know the
language cannot easily divide it into constituents.
• It does not tell us how to form new sentences, i.e., sentences that we have never been
found in a corpus data.

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