A Basic Course in Anthropological Linguistics (Studies in Linguistic ...

LINGUISTIC METHOD 5
Saussure’s approach came to be known, logically, as structuralism. In
America, it was adopted in the early twentieth century by the anthropologist
Franz Boas (1 858-1942), and a little later by his student Edward Sapir (1 884-
1939). However, unlike Saussure, Boas did not see the goal of linguistics as a
study of langue in itself, but rather as the description of how langue reflected
the cultural emphases of the speech community that used it. Linguists would
thus have to explain why, for example, in the Indonesian language the social
status of the person addressed is mirrored directly in the vocabulary used; and
why in the language spoken by the Nuer, a herding people of eastern Africa,
there are so many words for the colors and markings of cattle. In both cases,
the structure of the two languages reflects, respectively, the cultural importance
of social rank and livestock. In English, on the other hand, there are very few
words for describing livestock, but many for describing music (classical,
jazz, folk, rock, etc.), revealing the importance of music in our daily lives. The
study of the relation between language and society is such an obvious one,
Boas claimed, that it requires little or no justification.
By the early 1930s, as American structuralists applied and expanded upon
the basic Saussurean paradigm, it became obvious that a standard repertoire
of notions and techniques was required. This was provided by Leonard
Bloomfield (1887-1949) in his 1933 textbook titled Language. For two
decades after, linguists went about the painstaking work of documenting the
structures of different languages and of relating them to different cultural
emphases, using a basic Bloomfieldian manual of techniques. The first major
break from this tradition came in 1957, when the American linguist Noam
Chomsky (1928- ) argued that an understanding of language as a universal
faculty could never be developed from a piecemeal analysis of the disparate
sounds, word forms, etc., of widely divergent languages. Chomsky argued
that a true theory of language would have to explain why all languages seem to
reveal a similar plan for constructing their sentences. He proposed to do exactly
that by shifting the focus in linguistics away from making inventories of isolated
facts of language to a study of the “rule-making principles” that went into the
construction of sentence types. The basis of Chomsky’s approach can be
seen in the analysis he put forward of the following two sentences:
(1) John is eager to please
(2) John is easy to please
Both these sentences, Chomsky observed, would seem to be built from the
same structural plan on the “surface,” each consisting of a proper noun followed
by a copula verb and predicate complement: