ABSTRACT
The body of work published in the USA mainly in the 1940s and 1950s by, among others, Bernard Bloch, Zellig Harris, Charles Hockett, Georges Trager, Henry Lee Smith, Archibald Hill, and Robert Hall, and which was heavily influenced by Leonard Bloomfield’s book, Language (1933), is variably referred to in the literature as Bloomfieldian, Post-Bloomfieldian, taxonomic, descriptivist and structural. In this entry, the term post-Bloomfieldian American structural is preferred in order to distinguish the work to be referred to from other American descriptive structural work such as that of Sapir and Whorf (see MENTALIST LINGUISTICS) and Pike (see TAGMEMICS), and from European structuralism (see STRUCTURALIST LINGUISTICS).
