Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics.pdf

Dictionary of language and linguistics 332Referencesdistributionalismdistributionalism (also taxonomic analysis,taxonomic structuralism)Branch of American structuralism in the 1940s and 1950s characterized by the worksof Harris, Bloch, Trager, Joos, and others, which superseded the Bloomfield era. Harris’Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951) is viewed as the standard work of this phase.The goal of distributionalism is an experimentally verifiable, objective description of therelations inherent in the systems of individual languages, exclusive of all subjective andsemantic factors (semantics). These relations are the result of the distribution of theindividual elements among the various hierarchical linguistic levels (phonology,morphology, syntax), i.e. the derivation and classification of linguistic elements resultsfrom their occurrence in the sentence. The structure of each individual language can bedescribed by means of experimental methods, the so-called discovery procedures, inwhich essentially two analytical steps are applied: (a) segmentation of the materialthrough substitution. i.e. through paradigmatic interchangeability of elements having thesame function ( paradigm); and (b) classification of elements as phonemes,morphemes, among others, on the basis of their distribution and environment in thesentence. These analytical methods derive largely from research into Native Americanlanguages, which explains the asemantic character of the procedure: since the linguisticanalysis had to be carried out without knowledge of the given language (especially itsmeaning), the purely physical description of distribution was elevated to the highestprinciple, and meaning was likewise regarded as a function of distribution. Fundamentalcriticism, revision, and extension, especially with regard to transformational aspects, arefound in Postal (1964a).ReferencesBloch, B. 1942. Outline of linguistic analysis. Baltimore, MD.——1948. A set of postulates for phonetic analysis. Lg 24. 2–46.Chomsky, N. 1964. Current issues in linguistic theory. The Hague.Fries, C.C. 1961. The Bloomfield ‘school.’ In C. Mohrmann et al. (eds), Trends in European andAmerican linguistics 1930–1960. Utrecht. 196–224.Harris, Z.S. 1946. From morpheme to utterance. Lg 22. 161–83.——1951. Methods in structural linguistics. Chicago, IL.——1954. Distributional structure. Word 10. 146–62.Nida, E. 1946. Morphology: the descriptive analysis of words. Ann Arbor, MI. (Repr. 1949.)Postal, P.M. 1964a. Constituent structure: a study of contemporary models of syntactic description.Bloomington, IN.