ABSTRACT
General term for variously developed branches of structuralism pioneered above all by E.Sapir (1884-1939) and L.Bloomfield (1887-1949). Although the various schools cannot be clearly distinguished from one another, a distinction is made between two general phases: the so-called ‘Bloomfield Era,’ and distributionalism, with Z.Harris as chief representative. Common to all branches are certain scientific prerequisites which decisively influenced the specific methodological orientation of American structuralism. At first. an interest in dying Native American languages brought about interdisciplinary research in linguistics and anthropology. The occupation with culturally distant and as yet completely unresearched languages, which existed only orally, was a significant catalyst for the paroleoriented, purely descriptive methods of American structuralism ( langue vs parole). The works of E.Sapir and F.Boas are significant ( also field work). The theoretical and methodological format came to be determined in large part by the principles of behaviorist psychology ( behaviorism). Following the natural sciences, this direction of research reduces the object of its investigation to sensorally perceptible data and draws on observations made in animal experiments to explain human behavior. This restriction to an exact analysis of objectively experienced data meant that the problem of meaning was deemed an extralinguistic phenomenon, whereas phonology and grammar were subject to a strictly formal analysis, based on the discovery procedures of segmentation and classification. Methodologically, American structuralism is characterized by empirical ( empiricism) and inductive procedures, in which only the identification and arrangement of linguistic elements are relevant for grammatical description. ( also antimentalism, descriptive linguistics, item-andarrangement grammar)
References
Bloch, B. 1942. Outline of linguistic analysis. Baltimore, MD. Bloomfield, L. 1926. A set of postulates for the science of language. Lg 2. 153-64. ——1933. Language. New York.
