Презентация на тему American descriptivism

Sapir’s linguistic conception.
3. Leonard Bloomfield’s linguistic conception.
4. Antimentalism.
5. Distributionalism.
6.

Morphology in American structural Linguistics.

and methods of the 19th century comparative philology with

its focus on written records, historical analysis and interpretation.

American approach

Its pioneer was Franz Boas. Arose from preoccupations of American anthropologist, who established descriptions of the American Indian languages before they disappeared. Historical analysis was ruled out.

and analysis of languages which the linguist himself could

not speak and which had not previously been committed to writing.

- Antropological and ethnographical view – the attantion is paid to the life, habbits and “behaviour” of Indian tribes.

- Structuralistic view . Formed by Franz Boas : it is not necessary for all traditional categories to be present in all languages.

Mathematical methods – to formalize the analysis of the language and develop various models of grammatical description.

- Concentration on the form. The lexical meaning was disregarded.

a p i r
The world of our experience must

be enormously simplified and generalized into a symbolic inventory – language signs are units having form (speech sounds) and meaning (elements of experience).

Language is a dynamic system : “The feeling that our language is practically a fixed system is fallacious” [Language p.155]

“Eliminate society and the individual will never learn to talk”
“Language”

- the founder of Ethnolinguistics

Language has a certain norm – individual variations are swamped in or absorbed by major agreements.

sentences (finished sentence is a living sentence type, which

means that many sentences can be formed in relation to the same fundamental sentence pattern).

Words

American structuralism.
- “Introduction of the Study of Language” (1914)
-

“A set of postulates for the science of language” (1926)
-- “Language” (1933) – generations of American linguists during the 30s-40s.

Linguistics on scientific footing by scientific introduction, a perfect

description of a language.

The methods of linguists should resemble those of natural sciences.

The ideal use of language is seen in Mathematics.

The explanations of different kinds are cause-and-effect sequences.

brings about a reaction
“Jack and Jill are walking down

a lane. Jill is hungry, sees an apple, and makes a noise with her larynx, tongue and lips. Jack vaults the fence, climbs the tree, takes the apple, and brings it to Jill, who eats it.”

The scheme of this story is: S – r…s – R. Linguists should deal with the mediating part of the scheme (r….s).

leaving the meaning facet aside. The analysis of meaning

is the weak point in language study, which is related to the limited human knowledge.

This part of grammar was to be purely formal study, independent of semantics. On the other hand Bloomfield assumed that each linguistic form has a constant and definite meaning.

of morphemes in a language
A morpheme can have several

allomorphs. A set of related forms constitute a paradigm.

Morpheme – is the linguistic form that cannot be further divided into smaller parts. Linguistic form can be free (can be spoken alone) and bound (cannot be spoken alone).

Morpheme – is the minimal unit of grammatical structure. Its meaning is termed the sememe.

the division of each complex form into two, lower-level,

constituents.

Poor John ran away.
IC: poor John & ran away.

Poor John.
IC: poor & John.

Away
IC: a & way

form.
Primary word
Consist of a single morpheme such as man,

boy, cut or contain more than one bound form: re-ceive, de-ceive.

Compounds and derivations such as happy-go-lucky, down-to-earth

Secondary word

a l i s m
Mechanism of mentalism thesis: Speech

must be explained by the external conditions as well as internal one.

A speech act is an instance of behavior of a particular type.

Speech is an explanation that cannot be immediately achieved.

Bloomfieldian Linguistics took as a point of departure the behavourists Psychology.

They say that human conduct is totally predictable on the basis of the situations in which it occurs.

linguistic forms, which is the sum of the environments

in which the elements occurs.

The distributionalist program arose indirectly out of the view of meaning as a domain of continuously variable and possibly unknowable details without verifiable internal organization.

by the distributionalists:
Joos was actively interested in lexicology and

semantic structure;
Bloch regarded meaning as a practical shortcut to the results best obtained through more laborious;
Trager was fully committed to excluding meaning from Linguistics altogether.

The problem was to decide whether forms occuring in the same environments were different or equivalent.

meaning would be mutually substitutable in all environments, and

thus would not differ in distribution;
Forms differing in meaning are not mutually substitutable in all environments, and therefore differ in distribution;
Observation shows that different forms always differ somewhat in distribution, and therefore must differ somewhat in meaning;
A difference in form implies a difference in distribution and in turn a difference in meaning. There are thus no true synonyms.

Bloomfield’s view:

hypotheses concerning the function of the events being reported

and in characterizing them only by means of spatio-temporal criteria.

Consist in interpreting events according to their particular function in the particular world to which they belong.

Emic view

school typically viewed linguistics not so much as a

“theory” of the language nature, but rather as a body of descriptive and analytical procedures.

Linguistic analysis was expected to proceed by focusing selectively on one dimension of language structure at a time before tacking the next one.

Each dimention was formally referred to as a linguistic level.

The task was the separation of levels – first the pronunciation, then the word structure, then the sentence structure and finally the meaning of utterance.

structure – it consists of morphemes – the smallest

units of meaning and grammatical function.

The structuralists introduced morphology as a separate sub-branch of Linguistics.