ABSTRACT
Of the twenty nine men who signed the Call for the founding of the Linguistic Society of America in 1924, at least twenty one were engaged in teaching and research on ancient and classical languages, the historical development of languages, or the comparative linguistics formulated primarily in Europe during the nineteenth century (see the LSA lists of members in Language 1.7, 26-36[1925]). Only five were identified with the largely synchronic studies of Native American languages that came to be taken as one important characteristic of much of American linguistics in the second quarter of the twentieth century. As Hymes and Fought note in their section on ‘Philology’ in American linguistics, ‘structural linguistics was a subordinate theme in organized linguistics in the 1920s and 1930s’ (1981:51).
