This lecture discusses about American Structuralism.

1. 12. American Structuralism
Lecture No. 12
Zafar Ullah,
zafarullah76@gmail.com

2. Definition of Structuralism
• Structuralism proposes the idea that
many phenomena do not occur in
isolation, but instead occur in relation
to each other, and that all related
phenomena are part of a whole with
a definite, but not necessarily
defined, structure.
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3. American Structuralism
• European (1920’s) and another is North
American Structuralism (1930’s-1960’s) is
different from European Structuralism
(1920s).
• To reconstruct dead languages on the
basis of the similarities of existing
languages.
• Linguistics worked from a historical,
diachronic, perspective.
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4. Main Points of European Structuralism
• 1)Language has a structure
• 2)Language is a system of sings
• 3)Language operates at two levels:
langue and parole
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5. American Structuralism Beginning
• Beginning: a group of anthropologists
describing fast-disappearing American
Indian tribes.
They found that there was no methodology
for them to follow in order to describe these
languages.
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6. Leonard Bloomfield 1887-1949
• NA Structuralism centers in what people
actually say .
• Language, 1933
• Behaviourism
• Empiricism
• An approach to acquire knowledge that
emphasizes repeatable observations
through the physical senses
• Stimulus-response theory
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7. Main Points of American Structuralism
• 1) Linguistics is a descriptive science.
• 2) The primary form of language is the spoken one.
• 3) Every language is a system on its own right.
• 4) Language is a system in which smaller units
arrange systematically to form larger ones.
• 5) Meaning should not be part of linguistic
analysis.
• 6) The procedures to determine the units in
language should be objective and rigorous.
• 7) Language is observable speech, not knowledge.
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8. 1) Linguistics is a descriptive science.
• Describe what people say, not what people
should say.
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9. 2) The primary form of language is
the spoken one.
• Reasons:
• Child
• Writing system
• 1) Not every language has a written form.
• 2) Everybody learns an oral language.
• 3) The spoken form comes first than the
written one.
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10. 3) Every language is a system on its
own right.
• Philology
• Comparative linguistics
• Language should not be described in
terms of another language, but rather, it
should be described on its own terms.
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11. 4) Language is a system in which
smaller units arrange systematically
to form larger ones.
• These linguists proposed a procedure in
which they began analyzing the smallest
units and classifying them, and describing
the patterns into which they combined to
form larger units.
• Morphology to syntax
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12. 5) Meaning should not be part of
linguistic analysis.
• Bloomfield and many other structuralism
followers consider meaning as abstract
and unobservable, therefore, unscientific.
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13. 6) The procedures to determine the
units in language should be objective
and rigorous.
• NA Structuralism rejected traditional
definitions of, for example, a noun as “the
word that refers to persons, animals or
things” (definition based on meaning).
• In this respect, they provide two
observable criteria for defying the items of
language: Form and Distribution.
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14. 7) Language is observable speech,
not knowledge.
• Langue and parole were rejected as
unscientific abstractions. The main objective
would be to make a taxonomy of language
based on observable samples of speech
(corpus/corpora)
• Phonemes-morphemes-sentences patterns.
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15. Two Analytical Steps
• Segmentation
• Classification
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16. Two Phases
• 1. Bloomfield
• 2. Zellig Harris
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17. Behaviourism
• School of psychology which seeks to explain
animal and human behavior entirely in terms of
observable and measurable responses to
environmental stimuli. Behaviorism was
introduced (1913) by the American psychologist
John B. Watson, who insisted that behavior is a
physiological reaction to environmental stimuli.
• Tabula Rasa The mind comes as a blank slate
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18. Cont…
• The conditioned-reflex experiments of the
Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov and the
American psychologist Edward Thorndike were
central to the development of behaviorism. The
American behaviorist B. F. Skinner contended
that all but a few emotions were conditioned by
habit.
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19. Skinner (1904–90)
• American psychologist, leading exponent of the
school of psychology known as behaviorism,
which explains the behavior of humans and other
animals in terms of the physiological responses
of the organism to external stimuli.
• Skinner maintained that learning occurred as a
result of the organism responding to, or operating
on, its environment.
• operant conditioning
• Skinner box
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20. Stimulus Response Model
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21. Sapir Whorf Hypothesis
• 1. Linguistic structure and language habits shape
perception
• 2. The structure of anyone‘s language
determines/strongly influences the worldview
they will acquire as they learn the language
• 3. Structural differences between language
systems will, in general, be parallelled by non-
linguistic cognitive differences in the native
speakers of the languages (i.e., linguistic
structures predetermine not only how, but also
what we think).
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