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Leonard Bloomfield and the American Structuralism OLARU CRISTINA – MARIA RUSU MARIA – IULIA ANUL II, ENGLEZA – SPANIOLA Leonard Bloomfield and the American Structuralism The term structuralism is used in many contexts in different disciplines in the 20th century. 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. Structuralists, in any area of knowledge, attempt to perceive that structure and the changes that it may undergo with the goal of furthering the development of that system of phenomena or ideas. Collective term for a number of linguistic approaches in the first half of the twentieth century , all based on the work of F. de Saussure, but strongly divergent from one another. While ‘structuralism’ in its narrower sense refers to de Saussure’s linguistic theories , in its broader sense it is an umbrella term for approaches in anthropology, ethnology, sociology, psychology, and literary criticism, which – in analogy to linguistic structuralism – concentrate on synchronic analysis rather than on genetic / historical preconditions, in order to expose the universal structures at work under the surface of social relations. 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. Leonard Bloomfield (1887 – 1949) was an American linguist, whose influence dominated the development of structural linguistics in America between the 1930s and the 1950s. He is 1 especially known for his book Language (1933), describing the state of the art of linguistics at its time. Bloomfield was the main founder of the Linguistic Society of America. Bloomfield's thought was mainly characterized by its behavioristic principles for the study of meaning, its insistence on formal procedures for the analysis of language data, as well as a general concern to provide linguistics with rigorous scientific methodology. Its pre-eminence decreased in the late 1950s and 1960s, after the emergence of Generative Grammar. Bloomfield also began the genetic examination of the Algonquian language family with his reconstruction of Proto-Algonquian; his seminal paper on the family remains a cornerstone of Algonquian historical linguistics today. Leonard had six main publications during his lifetime, and they too have had their own little mark in the history of linguists. His first main book came in 1914, when he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois. It was called Introduction to the study of Language; this dealt with the overall aspect of language and was just the beginning of Leonard's profound career. After this Leonard went into the grammatical aspect of the Philippine language, he wrote and published his next main book Tagalog Texts with Grammatical Analysis (1917). The next book was called Menomini Texts (1928), one of Bloomfield's least favorable publications. In the middle of his writing career came Language (1933), which was the book he is renowned for. From here Leonard went deeper into grammar, and wrote The Stressed Vowels of American English (1935). The last main book of Leonard Bloomfield's career was when he went back into the scientific research of language. It dealt with the overall aspect of language and science, and didn't get as much publicity as Language. This book was called Linguistic Aspects of Science (1939). At the end of Leonard's writing career, he tried to write about other languages (Dutch and Russian) but couldn't really get the true feeling out of this, like he did with his other books. In the end, Leonard Bloomfield is not only considered one of the best Linguists of his time, he is considered one of the best of all time. American Structuralism based on structural linguistics developed by Saussure. Bloomfield is known for applying the principles of behaviorist psychology to linguistics, defining "the meaning of a linguistic form as the situatio in which the speaker utters it, and the response it calls forth in the hearer." (Oller, 1979). Sapir’s work has always held an attraction for the more anthropologically inclined American linguists. But it was Bloomfield who prepared the 2 way for the later phase of what is now thought of as the most distinctive manifestation of American "structuralism." When he published his first book in 1914, Bloomfield was strongly influenced by Wundt's psychology of language. In 1933, however, he published a drastically revised and expanded version with the new title Language; this book dominated the field for the next 30 years. In it Bloomfield explicitly adopted a behavioristic approach to the study of language, eschewing in the name of scientific objectivity all reference to mental or conceptual categories. Of particular consequence was his adoption of the behavioristic theory of semantics according to which meaning is simply the relationship between a stimulus and a verbal response. Because science was still a long way from being able to give a comprehensive account of most stimuli, no significant or interesting results could be expected from the study of meaning for some considerable time, and it was preferable, as far as possible, to avoid basing the grammatical analysis of a language on semantic considerations. Linguistics was in a period of confusion in the early 1930s when Bloomfield battled Sapir for discipline supremacy. Bloomfield was a colleague of Sapir at Yale University, and they held opposite theoretical positions, as Bloomfield rejected the possibility that linguistics analyze meaning, while Sapir thought that semantics is an essential part of the study of language. Bloomfield had originally been allied with Sapir and a supporter of Saussure's ideas. But before Yale (at Ohio State), he was influenced by logical positivism and the related movement of behaviorism. Bloomfield's book Language (1933) dominated the field for the next 30 years. In it he explicitly adopted a behavioristic approach to the study of language, eschewing, in the name of scientific objectivity, all reference to mental or conceptual categories.His ideas became strictly empirical. Such a view discouraged not only an inquiry into the universal properties of language, but the study of meaning as well, given the notorious difficulty of making explicit the precise meaning of an utterance. He adopted the behaviorist theory of semantics according to which meaning is simply the relationship between a stimulus and a verbal response. Behaviorism was an American school of psychology founded by John B. Watson, who insisted that all behavior is a physiological response to environmental stimuli. Behaviorism required Bloomfield to reformulate the place of semantics within linguistics, since that conception of language does not allow for any kind of concept or mental image, but only sets of stimuli and responses that occur in certain situations. 3 The advantage of speech for the human organism was that one person could receive the stimulus, but another person carry out the response. Therefore the division of labor and all advanced civilization results from speech. Bloomfield's conception of science and of the scientific method shaped his approach to linguistic matters. He thought that physics and biology obtained scientific control over the phenomena that they study because they abandoned teleological pseudo-explanations. Dualistic conceptions of humans assume a mental parallel to the body, a nonphysical entity such as a mind or a will. The monist conception, compatible with physics and biology, was taking steps in several disciplines dedicated to the study of language, including psychology. Bloomfield thought that the Vienna Circle and the behaviorists took an advanced position, considering false the question of the relation between matter and mind: In scientific formulations, mentalistic terms should refer to linguistic events, not to a supposed mentalistic entity. Mentalistic statements subjected to linguistic analysis will be revealed to be statements about language. The linguist must observe and register carefully the facts of speech and the situations in which they happen, without resorting to that which cannot be observed. For linguistics to be an autonomous scientific discipline, the observations must be free from prejudices and independent from philosophical, psychological, and commonsense assumptions. Bloomfield made important empirical contributions to three major subfields of Linguistics: Indo-European comparative-historical linguistics (including work on Sanskrit as well as Germanic); the study of the Malayo-Polynesian languages, principally Tagalog; and descriptive and comparative Algonquian linguistics (a monumental study). Bloomfield had immense influence–the so-called Bloomfieldian era‘ lasted for more than 20 years. During this time, linguists focused mostly on writing descriptive grammars of unwritten languages. Bloomfield and his followers were interested in the forms of linguistic items and in their distributional arrangement. Meaning, according to Bloomfield, was not observable using rigid methods of analysis, and it was therefore the weak point in language study. 4 The 'post-Bloomfieldians' dominated American linguistics in the 1940s and 1950s. One of their
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