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.
Leonard Bloomfield (April 1, 1887 – April 18, 1949) was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. He was one of the founding members of the Linguistic Society of America. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics.
Leonard Bloomfield is the father of modern American linguistics. Crucial in his work was his influence by behavioristic psychology, which rejects all that is non-physical or non-observable in search of being empiricist in approach. Bloomfield maintained that language should be studied like a natural science. Most importantly, he made influential contributions to the development of vigorous tools for the analysis of language.
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 way for the later phase of what is now thought of as the most distinctive manifestation of American “structuralism.”
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.
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.
Phoneme, Morpheme, IC (Syntax) and Linguistic Analysis
Bloomfield used two fundamental units of linguistic description with which American structuralism became particularly associated:
- 1) the phoneme … ‘a minimum same of vocal feature … or distinctive sound’ as a unit of phonology,
- 2) the morpheme … ‘a recurrent (meaningful) form which cannot in turn be analyzed into smaller recurrent (meaningful) forms’ as the unit of grammatical structure (Bloomfield, 1926: 156-157). Bloomfield later defined the morpheme (or ‘simple form’) as a ‘form which bears no partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to any other form’ (1933: 161).
Immediate Constituent Analysis
In addition to his remarkable contribution to the fields of phonology and morphology, Bloomfield’s name is usually attached to a pioneering syntactic theory called immediate constituent analysis (ICA). Basically, ICA is an explicit method of analyzing sentences grammatically by dividing them into their component parts. It is structural in nature because it no longer considers a sentence as a sequence or string of isolated elements, but it is made up of layers of groups or constituents. A constituent is a group of words or morphemes with closer relationships between one another than between the elements of the other groups or constituents within the same sentence. The constituent is part of a larger unit.
Also Read: Structuralism in Linguistics
The methodology of ICA consists in splitting a sentence up into two immediate constituents, which are analyzable into further constituents. This process of segmentation continues until the smallest indivisible units, the morphemes, are reached. The latter are called the ultimate constituents, and each is given an identifying label. As a principle, the partition in ICA is binary. Let us take Bloomfield’s classical example “Poor John ran away”.
According to ICA, a sentence is not seen a string of elements, but it is made up of layers of constituents (or nodes). Thus, constituent structure is hierarchical.
Features of American Structuralism
It is agreed upon that the American linguistic studies emerged from the institutes of anthropology rather than from the institutes of languages. The American scholars were anthropologists who developed structural ideas far away from European work. They worked on existing languages, the Amerindian languages. Field work techniques of anthropologists characterized their approach. American structuralists avoided the prescriptive attitude because they were in need to develop fresh descriptive frameworks fitting these languages’ actual features. They also emphasized the uniqueness of each language’s structure. The leading figures of the American structural studies were Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Leonard Bloomfield.
The American linguists had the following aims:
- To describe current spoken language, not dead languages.
- To focus on language form as a sole objective, thus neglecting meaning to a subordinate place.
The ‘post-Bloomfieldians’ dominated American linguistics in the 1940s and 1950s. One of their most prominent members was Chomsky’s teacher Zellig Harris. For American structuralists, the ultimate goal of linguistics was the perfection of the discovery procedures–a set of principles which would give them a foolsproof way to discover the linguistic units of an unwritten language. Their goal was explicitly to ‘discover’ a grammar by performing a set of operations on a corpus of data. Each successive operation was to be one step farther removed from the corpus.
Key Differences Between Saussure and Bloomfield’s Structuralism
| Aspect | Ferdinand de Saussure (European Structuralism) | Leonard Bloomfield (American Structuralism) |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Language as a system of signs (structural relationships). | Language as a system of forms and structures (scientific analysis). |
| Approach | Synchronic (studying language at a particular time). | Empirical and behaviorist (language as observable data). |
| Key Concept | Langue vs. Parole (Language system vs. individual speech). | Immediate Constituent (IC) Analysis (breaking down sentence structure). |
| Meaning (Semantics) | Emphasized meaning and linguistic signs (signifier & signified). | Ignored meaning, focused on phonetics and structure. |
| Methodology | Used structural relationships to analyze language. | Used distributional analysis (examining linguistic units in context). |
| Influence | Basis for later semiotics and structural linguistics. | Foundation for descriptive linguistics in the U.S. |
