Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics.pdf

A-Z 51American EnglishEnglishAmerican Sign Language (abbrev. ASL)sign languageAmerican structuralism (also post-Bloomfieldian linguistics)General term for variously developed branches of structuralism pioneered above all byE.Sapir (1884–1939) and L.Bloomfield (1887–1949). Although the various schoolscannot be clearly distinguished from one another, a distinction is made between twogeneral phases: the so-called ‘Bloomfield Era,’ and distributionalism, with Z.Harris aschief representative. Common to all branches are certain scientific prerequisites whichdecisively influenced the specific methodological orientation of American structuralism.At first. an interest in dying Native American languages brought about interdisciplinaryresearch in linguistics and anthropology. The occupation with culturally distant and as yetcompletely unresearched languages, which existed only orally, was a significant catalystfor the paroleoriented, purely descriptive methods of American structuralism ( languevs parole). The works of E.Sapir and F.Boas are significant ( also field work). Thetheoretical and methodological format came to be determined in large part by theprinciples of behaviorist psychology ( behaviorism). Following the natural sciences,this direction of research reduces the object of its investigation to sensorally perceptibledata and draws on observations made in animal experiments to explain human behavior.This restriction to an exact analysis of objectively experienced data meant that theproblem of meaning was deemed an extralinguistic phenomenon, whereas phonologyand grammar were subject to a strictly formal analysis, based on the discoveryprocedures of segmentation and classification. Methodologically, Americanstructuralism is characterized by empirical ( empiricism) and inductive procedures, inwhich only the identification and arrangement of linguistic elements are relevant forgrammatical description. ( also antimentalism, descriptive linguistics, item-andarrangementgrammar)ReferencesBloch, 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.